


Andrea's Diner

by lizbobjones



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Andrea Kormos - Freeform, Asexual Castiel, Benny Lafitte - Freeform, Castiel POV, Comfortably Bisexual Dean Winchester, M/M, Past Castiel/Meg Masters, Past Lisa Braeden/Dean Winchester, Sam and Eileen are a side pairing, Sam x happiness, blatant misuse of an IKEA, but it's mostly fluff about Cas working at a diner so it's not super heavy, diner au, general bad coping methods like you could expect to find in canon, warning for the characters being a little messed up and infrequent mentions of suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-10-19 08:02:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 29
Words: 64,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10635672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbobjones/pseuds/lizbobjones
Summary: Castiel works at Andrea's Diner in a quiet seaside town where nothing ever happens. Then a stranger in a beautiful car comes through town searching for his brother, and running away isn't so easy as it was before - for any of them.





	1. Chapter 1

“Is this really the only place to get coffee in town?”

“You could buy a coffee machine from the store next door,” Castiel suggests dryly, not looking up until it’s too late to see what unsuspecting tourist he’d snarked at while finishing stacking the baked goods display. It was late, close to closing, and raining hard, business almost non-existent for the last few hours, and he could put a cover over them and leave them for the morning breakfast rush. As long as his latest customer doesn’t have a sweet tooth for pastry.

The coffee-seeker is tall, and soaked from the rain, and attractive enough that even Cas can notice on first glance. Maybe it’s not just the structure of his face, but the way he’s got an amused smirk at being talked to like that. His face is full of warmth – his eyes are kind.

“You’re not great for tourism, are you? No wonder this town is so –”

Cas raises an eyebrow, not interested in rolling over just because he’d found the man aesthetically pleasing. Not when he was also _teasing_.

The man fakes horror. “Oh, holy crap, you _like_ it here.”

“It’s peaceful,” Cas says, trying not to sound too defensive. While also defending his right to exist.

The man rolls his eyes. “Sure, you keep it that way by scaring off all your more cowardly customers. Well, I’ll have a coffee, black, and the burger, cheese, extra onions. And one of those swirly pastry things–” Cas feels like his resentful gaze at the stand has betrayed him there. “–Since there’s nowhere else to eat that serves pie with a smile, you’re going to have to put up with me and I’ll put up with the tiny pastry.”

He grins at Cas with the absolute confidence of someone who thinks he’s made a friend instead of ensuring his burger will get spat in. Cas supposes he _did_ start it. And he knows he has no intention of spitting in this man’s food. Not that he ever does it, but he’s heard enough horror stories to wonder why anyone would antagonise the people who make their food.

Cas pours a coffee from the pot that’s right on hand, and the bedraggled man hugs it close between his hands. “Mm, this coffee is –” he takes a sip. “ _Terrible_.”

Cas raises an eyebrow at him. “It’s the only coffee you’ll get here.”

“… Coffee is terrible, kind of like your customer service,” the man says, for some reason throwing in a wink and a finger gun.

Cas rolls his eyes and goes back into the kitchen at the back to start the burger.

There’s something calming about dropping a patty onto the hotplate and listening to it hiss and spit for a moment. Time to get his thoughts in order. He glances through the long glassless window between the kitchen and the rest of the small diner to see his guest is hugging the coffee close between his hands, huffing in the steam while he waits for it to cool. He’s glancing around at the pictures on the walls. Mostly photos of local boats, dramatic fishing catches, and the sort of weird local events that need an hour to explain properly. Left in isolation, festivals could pick up the strangest customs. The chair race that goes down the promenade outside the diner is Cas’s favourite. Some of the ones involving raw fish, rather less so.

With nothing left to do while he waits for the burger, he goes back out to wipe down the counter nearby, as a pretext to talk.

“So are you passing through town?” he asks.

“Uh, that depends.”

“On what?”

“On how long this burger takes.”

Cas laughs to himself, turning away to not give the man the pleasure. “I’m Castiel.”

“Dean – so I take it you’re not _the_ Andrea?” He gestures one of the menus with its swirly “Andrea’s” taking up half the front side in a sea-green font.

“No, that would be the owner’s wife. I just work here.”

“Alone?”

Cas shrugs. “Benny trusts me. They’re mostly out at sea on her yacht.”

Dean raises his eyebrows. “I had no idea a diner in a small town far away from the highway paid so well.”

“She’s a wealthy heiress… You would not believe their story.”

“Don’t tell me it’s some sappy chick flick with him naming the diner after her to woo her and her harbouring her yacht here for him now or something.”

Leaving with a smile at Dean, Cas goes to check on the burger, a flutter in his stomach just for smirking at him.

“That’s revolting, by the way,” Dean comments, loudly so it carries through the window and over the sound of the frying meat. “I’m probably getting romance cooties just sitting in here.”

Cas looks through the window at him. “You can’t be too careful, if you didn’t get your cootie shot.”

“You’re making fun of me.” He actually sounds surprised. “Damn, you really are confident about being the only place to get hot food for fifty miles.”

“I reserve the right. You sound like a boy on the playground who will go pull a girl’s pigtails as revenge for infecting him with ‘cooties’.”

“I-I’ll pull _your_ pigtails,” he mutters, losing heart on the comeback halfway through. He takes an angry sip of coffee, Cas thinks to hide a smile, and Cas turns back to flipping the burger, so he can smile as well. It wouldn’t do to lose this battle when he just seemed to pull ahead.

The meat looks like it should to be cooked to perfection, if he knows his burgers, so he serves it up, loading on the onions and cheese, before taking it out. “If you want anything else fried, tell me now. I’m going to turn off the hotplate to clean it otherwise.”

Dean shrugs one shoulder and digs into the burger, making an obscene groan as he does so. Cas is both horrified and fascinated watching him take huge bites without pausing, the visual wholly off-putting but his moans are uncomfortably enthusiastic.

Cas has only just given himself an excuse to leave for the safety of the kitchen, but instead he’s loitering behind the counter, watching. He can’t even make the usual required small talk checking how the food is because Dean’s obviously got no problems with the burger whatsoever.

When he’s eaten half, in record time, Dean pauses to wash it down with a gulp of coffee.

“I take it you’ve had a long day then,” Cas says.

Dean nods, picking up the burger but thankfully not digging in again immediately. “I’ve been driving all day… Been to two other towns along the coast, not much time to stop and eat.”

“Are you working?”

He half-shrugs. “Kinda. I’m looking for my brother. Have you seen him?” his voice suddenly picks up with interest, rolling out a script he must have been saying all day one way or another. “About, like… really tall. Six foot four or something. Long hair, long… everything I guess. Answers to Sam. Or Sammy. Actually, don’t call him that.”

“I’ll remember it… What’s the story there?”

Dean shifts uncomfortably on the stool and takes another bite, to think before he answers. He looks less like he’s enjoying the burger as he pieces together the answer: “He up and quit this fancy law firm job out of nowhere, and I only find out when his boss phones our – well, he’s listed as Uncle Bobby on our contacts lists – and asks him where the hell Sam is, and Bobby phones me, and I’m working off on the other side of the country, and I think, first place he’d come to is me, so I’ll just wait and kick his ass when he shows up.

“‘Bout two days later I started getting worried and drove out to some of our old haunts, to see if there was a sign of him, but the only lead I get is from goddamn _Marv_ who says he thinks Sam was heading east to the sea, and like hell I believe that dick because he wasn’t even clear if he _saw_ him or not, making all these cryptic poetic comments, but I don’t have anything else to go on, so I headed up to his ex, Sarah’s, old beach house because I know he likes this area at least, and there’s cities to the north, so I started working my way down, asking everyone I saw, and that was three days ago.”

Explanation over, he takes another bite. “Fuck, this burger makes it all worth it though.”

“Have you thought about hiring someone to help you look?”

Dean grimaces, like Cas suggested he share his burger. “It’s the family business.”

“Running away?”

He snorts, considers that for a moment, then shakes his head. “Private investigation. I’d kind of be a failure if I couldn’t find my own brother.”

Not wanting his words to be betrayed by the falseness of his actions, Cas stops pretending to wipe the counter down, and leans forward to talk sincerely to Dean. “I don’t think that would be your fault, if he didn’t want to be found. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.”

“What do you know?” Dean asks, looking away.

“You said it was the family business. I think he knows exactly how you would look for him.”

Dean eats several more bites of burger, before he concedes that point. “Yeah, fine. What do you think should I do, if you’re such an expert?”

“Why don’t you give me your number so I can call you if I see him around?”

“He’s not here.”

“He’s not here _now_. Besides, I get a lot of local traffic. As you say, there aren’t many places to get coffee. I could start asking regulars who pass through here to keep an eye out, and spread a net.”

Dean chews up the last mouthful of the burger, then nods. “Okay, that’s a pretty smooth way to sweet talk my number, not going to lie.” He reaches across the counter and pulls Cas’s notepad from the front pocket of his apron and unhooks the pen from the spine. While Cas is still staring at him, open-mouthed at this sudden over-familiar gesture, Dean scribbles down his number underneath the grease-stained final order Cas had needed to take down earlier in the day. The notepad doesn’t get much use.

“You should take my number too,” Cas says, when Dean pushes the pad back across the counter.

“Why?”

“For if you find him without my help. I’ll need to know to stop asking people about Sam.”

“Oh. Right.”

Cas isn’t sure, at least, that Dean will remember to tell him, but he figures if a few months go by and he’s not heard anything after asking everyone he’d trust, then he doesn’t have to keep asking everyone forever. Maybe he’ll hear how the story ended in passing from someone who has no idea Cas came into direct contact with one side of it. There’s not a whole lot to talk about in this area, so pretty much anything can become news. Something like Dean running around talking to everyone is going to cause its own little waves whatever happens with finding Sam.

Dean takes the last few bites of his burger as Cas writes his number underneath Dean’s and tears off the bottom of the page. Once he’s done that Cas drifts back into serving mode. He gets Dean’s pastry ready, covers the rest over, and does some small end of day tasks; topping up Dean’s mug so he can empty the pot and turn off the coffee machine, starting to move all the things he won’t need again to the sink at the back, and finally getting around to turning off the hotplate.

He rejoins Dean when he’s done enough busywork to not hate himself after Dean leaves, and to try to put on a show in front of him that he’s actually doing his job. Dean has eaten most of the pastry, and is glaring at his phone.

“It’s late… Is there anywhere to stay here?”

“There’s a B&B but you’d have to check with them – they only have a couple of rooms and one of them has a permanent guest who has never left.”

Dean makes a face.

 _There’s always my place_ , Cas thinks. He has a sofa: why not offer Dean a space for the night? It’s innocent enough but he has a crazy desire just to feel like he took Dean home; to have him there in the morning, just as a peek into a world where that was something he could see all the time. He’s never clicked with a stranger so well as this. He’s never really “clicked” with anyone. He probably shouldn’t have traded numbers with him. It’s making him wish for things.

“I think I’d do better to drive on to the next town and find a place to stay there, and start asking around first thing in the morning. Worse comes to worse, I always can sleep in the car.”

“Are you sure?” He wishes he didn’t feel so disappointed.

“Yeah, I do it all the time. Uh, I’m not, you know, homeless. I just travel a lot. For work. Private investigating and all.”

Cas nods, and takes Dean’s empty plate, leaving him to nurse the dregs of his coffee.

“Well, uh, thanks for the conversation,” Dean calls through the window. Cas can see him shrugging his jacket back on, throwing back the coffee. Cas hurries back out with a flutter of panic in his stomach now. This is it – he’ll never see him again and he hasn’t even memorised his face or gotten one last good look at his eyes. Dean fishes a few bills out of his pocket, counts them, and drops what Cas can see is a pretty decent tip included on the counter. “I really ought to be going.”

“Good luck finding your brother.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “He’s not going to want to hear you say that because I’m going to kick his ass when I catch up to him.”

Cas blows a laugh through his nose. “It’s been interesting meeting you.” _Call me_.

Dean hesitates, looks Cas up and down, and nods. “Yeah, uh, little advice? Don’t be so confident about your coffee you can insult all your customers and think they won’t drive fifty miles to the next place.”

“You stayed.”

Dean frowns dubiously, teasing like it really was a hard choice, and then winks at Cas, and turns and leaves.

Cas sighs to himself when the door’s closed and Dean’s swaggered off into the night, and he goes to clean the hotplate.


	2. Chapter 2

A week and a half later, one of the tallest men Cas has ever met comes into the diner. It’s gone ten in the morning and he’s serving all the tables alone, though the cook is in – Cas is only truly alone after Eileen leaves at eight.

Thankfully the tall man is patient, setting up in the corner with a stack of books and papers, spreading out over a table that could have seated four, though whoever sat opposite would have their issues with his great legs folded under the table. He’s got long shaggy hair, and the look of someone savouring every moment of their copious free time, so Cas doesn’t sweat the introductions and hurries by to pour coffee, grabs an order for the pancake breakfast with all the fruit but no syrup, and moves to other tables and leaves him to it.

The breakfast rush clears out close to eleven, reliable as the tides, and the tall man is working in peace, making notes and picking at the pancakes so slowly he’s mostly eaten the fruit and not much else. Cas comes over for his third coffee refill though, admittedly snooping hard on the old reference books in their faded cloth and leather covers, gold lettering worn thin and illegible on the titles.

“What are you working on?” he asks, and the man actually jumps like he had been startled, though Cas had refilled the mug right in his supposed line of sight.

He self-consciously covers his notes with one large hand before he answers - “A novel. Uh. Sort of. I’m not sure what about yet. Please don’t ask me.”

Cas makes a point to try and smile kindly at him, also to show he’s not looking at the all-caps notes scribbled on the yellow legal pad in front of him. “All right. Can I ask if you’re passing through town?”

The man looks suspiciously at him for a moment too long, but then smiles, only a little forced. “I just moved into the house at the end of the sea road. I want to stay for a while. Get off the grid...”

“Lay low,” Cas comments.

The man raises his eyebrows sharply. He looks guilty, caught out, and not wrangling that look away well enough as he consciously tries to smooth his face out.

Cas tries another placating smile. “Why do you think I’m working in a diner in a town I’m not from, in the middle of nowhere?”

The man takes a moment to size him up again, and then smiles almost with relief. “My job was just – you want to be a lawyer when you’re young, make a lot of money, do some good, buy a house and get a wife, a dog, some kids...” He rubs his face tiredly. “Nothing worked out like it should have.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I made the money, anyway. And I could have kept going at the city job until it killed me, or I could have bought a cheap house in the middle of nowhere, and started over with enough money to live off while I find my feet.”

“Andrea’s is always hiring, when that doesn’t work out.”

The man laughs, thankfully appreciating Cas’s dark humour, and holds out his hand. “Sam.”

“Cas.” He doesn’t know how to push him for more information, but he figures that must have been their official introduction, if Sam is a local now.

He goes to clear some other tables, and leaves Sam to work, while he thinks about calling Dean.

The thing is, Sam looks happy. And sounds like he knows what he’s doing.

And is about ten or fifteen years older than he’d sounded when Dean described him.

Cas had been imagining some intern law student freaking out and ditching their first big opportunity. Sam doesn’t exactly look retirement age despite his new employment status, but he is definitely in his thirties. Mid thirties. His choice to be left alone suddenly seems a lot less like something an exasperated caregiver should happily ignore in favour of what’s genuinely best for Sam, and more like an honest request. Maybe Sam really had had a big meltdown and fled to an isolated small town. And who is Cas of all people to judge about that?

But Dean had been worried. And if Sam’s a full grown adult who can take care of himself, he can stand his ground about staying here if he likes. But he and his brother should talk.

At least, when he goes on his break, this is where Cas ends up flip flopping to between letting this work itself out and feeling like Dean already had Cas’s word on this.

Every customer but Sam has left. Eileen can help him if he needs another coffee top up in the five minutes since the last – Cas has told her to keep an eye on him and she is more than happy to do that – and Cas flips back through his notebook for Dean’s number.

He strolls along the promenade – the only part of town with any good phone signal. The sea is on his left, the gulls loud and the waves choppy that morning with a stiff breeze. Dean’s number rings and rings and Cas thinks it’s about to go to voice mail when finally he gets a gruff, “Hey.”

“It’s Cas. From the diner.”

“Oh, the one with the terrible coffee.”

“That’s me.”

“What are–”

“Your brother is drinking that ‘terrible’ coffee right now.”

“What?!”

“He lives in town.”

“You’re not making it up just to see me again?”

“He’s complaining about how his life plan didn’t work out to anyone who stands still too long filling his mug, and he’s writing a novel.”

“Wow, shit. He’s really snapped from the pressure. Did he get a dog?”

“Uh – no, he mentioned _not_ having one.”

“I’ve got to hurry. I can probably get there by tomorrow… Try not to have such terrible customer service you piss him off and he leaves. Tackle him if he says he’s going to a pound or animal rescue shelter.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Dean hangs up on him.

A nearby seagull squawks from atop a lamppost.

Cas scowls at it, and goes back to the diner.

Eileen’s mixing cake batter and paying no attention to the bowl when Cas gets back –cake mixture is splattering her apron. Cas nudges her shoulder as politely as he can and she jumps.

“I was watching,” she says, though she doesn’t even wait to see Cas’s reaction to that defence, glancing over at Sam, before bowing her head over the task of mixing properly, her ears are saying everything with their redness.

Sam doesn’t seem to have noticed her, anyway, and his mug looks empty, so Cas ignores the cleaning he’d have to do eventually (and Eileen can do the cake-splattered counter top), and takes the coffee pot out to the table in the corner.

“How’s the novel going?”

“No better than it was before your break, though I’ve seen eighteen distinct seagulls and started naming them.”

“Perhaps you should write about them instead.”

Sam buries his face in his hands and rubs it vigorously. “This is much harder than it seems, you know.” He looks up despairingly, face scrubbed pink. “I thought if I just had some peace and quiet, I could get it all down… Ugh, my brother would find this so easy.”

Cas’s heart bounces in his chest, thinking, he has to be talking about Dean. “Really?” His voice sounds all wrong – too desperate to sound flat and not like he’s impatient to hear more about someone he already knows. Somehow, Sam should be able to tell.

But he just waves his hand irritably. “He’s got this… I don’t know. Charisma about stuff. He never even finished high school, just bullshitted his way into some well-paying computer job – I swear, I saw his application and where it asked how he used a computer, he just wrote ‘porn’…”

“You can _do_ that? And get the job?”

“If you’re Dean.”

Now Cas’s heart is thudding but not just because Sam said his name – confirmed beyond a doubt that these two people are definitely the brothers Cas assumed they were. And yet this doesn’t match up to Dean’s comment about his job, and… Sam has nothing to gain or lose, he’s just talking out writers’ block, and really, who would _believe_ that someone is a private investigator? Is it even a real job outside of movies and comic books?

Maybe he just said it because he was looking for Sam. Maybe he didn’t want help… But the lie came so easily, and Sam’s a grown adult who knows his own mind, and his brother’s too, apparently, and is talking about laying low and…

Cas thinks he may have been taken for a fool.

Sam is still talking, as Cas stares at him, processing this: “And then he met Charlie, and they had a big successful start up… I mean, Dean wasn’t even doing all the hard work. I _know_ Charlie can code circles around him – she’s like a hacker from the movies when you see her work – and he was mostly there to play video games and whatever else he does. Get coffee, probably.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Cas says on autopilot.

Sam laughs. “Right. And I think he finally lost that job, for obvious reasons, and works in a bar right across the country now, but… Well, you don’t need to hear all this… God, what am I doing, telling the guy at the diner my brothers’ life story instead of working? I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Your brother sounds interesting.”

Sam pulls a face. “Overbearing. Don’t get me wrong, I love him. But in a way where we meet up for sports and concerts and vacations and… stuff that’s not our actual lives. We’d rather spend two weeks hiking in the woods, supposedly hunting and not catching anything, and just… talk about TV and what other people from our hometown did with themselves, tell each other horror stories, that sort of thing, than actually deal with each other’s lives. We did Thanksgiving a few years back, and it was brutal. Dean snapped and went to a bar halfway through dinner and Mom only showed up after he left she was so late, so she only stayed for five minutes to say hi.”

“So that left you to eat an entire turkey by yourself?”

Sam laughs, thankfully, and Cas feels like he’s desperately currying points with the brother he should have been backing the entire time, and has ratted out unfairly.

He likes Sam.

He’s not magnetically compelling like Dean. But he’s nice.

When Cas returns to the kitchen, Eileen is standing waiting with her hands on her hips, before she signs to him, confident Sam will have no idea, “You were in the way.”

“Go talk to him yourself,” Cas says, and immediately regrets snapping at her. She always reads him way too well.

“I was only asking,” she replies, unimpressed.

Cas sighs, and goes to start doing the huge stack of dishes during their lull of work. Eileen trails after him, not giving up so easily. She never does. “Did he say something bad?” she asks, leaning right back into his line of sight as he tries to stoop over the sink. “Did _you_ say something bad? I think that’s more likely.”

Cas takes a moment to inspect the ceiling for guidance in a pathetically empty gesture before turning to her, hands dripping soapy water as he glances through the window at an oblivious Sam, and signs to Eileen, “I think I fucked up _._ ”

 


	3. Chapter 3

Time always moves slowly in the little town, but the next shift is the most painful crawl of Cas’s life. Sam shows up later than the day before, looking well-rested, and he actually eats more of his pancakes immediately, while he’s still clicking his pen and looking out the window for inspiration, or his seagull friends.

Cas almost goes to warn him what he’s done.

Eileen scowls at him the entire time, silently implying Cas should go talk to Sam, at least to find out more.

“It’s his life, not yours,” she had said, after Sam had packed up and left. Cas had managed to ignore her and do dishes and escape to the front of the diner to avoid this conversation earlier. It just meant Eileen was happy to give it to him verbally.

“I think Dean was genuinely worried,” Cas told her. “I want to know his side.”

“Then phone him again. Talk to him now.”

Cas kept a close eye on his notepad and phone in case Eileen sneaked them to text Dean, but aside from that, had just walked home locking and unlocking his phone until it ran out of power before he even got to his door, and then was relieved to leave it charging so he _definitely_ couldn’t call Dean after that while his phone was out of commission, sitting right there on his kitchen counter. He got ready for bed an hour earlier than he ever normally would, and crawled under the covers feeling like he was actually hiding. From his phone.

He hasn’t slept. He’s been turning the details of what he knows so far over and over, trying to see past Dean’s smile. It had been so warm, and friendly, and they’d got on like they’d been teasing each other over that counter for years.

But he’d been searching for his adult brother, who did not want to be found, and clearly _by Dean_ was the implied end of that sentence, from the way he’d talked about him. A sort of _I love him, but…_ situation. And Dean had lied to Cas for no reason whatsoever except that he could get away with it, and it had made him sound interesting and dangerous.

Cas feels used, like he’s had an actual fling with him, only for his investment to be thrown back in his face with lies and betrayal. He’s not used to being disappointed like this. It hurt, all night, the same stupid thoughts rolling around in his head like the waves were tossing them back up into sight every time he thought he’d shoved them away.

The other option is phoning Dean up and saying he’s wrong, it’s not Sam here after all, maybe you shouldn’t come at all… Leave it to fate if Dean ever finds out some other way, and Cas plays dumb, cuts out any hope of Dean being a part of his life before it’s ever had a chance.

Maybe he could say it’s because Sam said Dean was just some guy who worked at a bar and played video games all day, who couldn’t possibly be the same man Cas met.

Would Dean come crawling and check anyway? Would he find Sam despite Cas’s thought to sabotage him? Someone who uproots everything to spend weeks driving around searching isn’t just going to stop… He’d at least want to see for himself what Cas was talking about, just to be sure… At least, Cas knows he would if someone changed their mind on him like that. If he knew he’d been caught out in a lie and that Sam was the very ordinary truth to their lives…

The lunch rush passes mechanically, Cas too tired to do more than force his smile and take orders and serve tables, with the most scripted conversations with regulars. The door is a leaden weight in his mind, pulling his eyes towards it constantly, like any moment Dean will walk through; anyone else entering and setting the little bell above the door ringing sets Cas’s heart racing at the same time until he sees who it is.

Finally the diner clears and Sam’s left alone in his corner, ignoring Cas moving around cleaning, or Eileen drifting over to watch him, hoping to catch his eye. Sam had left around five yesterday, when it started to get busy again, and he’d clearly realised his work was going to be interrupted. Today, Cas suspects he’ll behave the same, unless he has somewhere else to be. Cas feels even worse wishing he’ll hit such a block he picks up and leaves earlier. Instead, Sam asks Cas to keep an eye on his stuff, and takes a walk around four thirty, returns at five with his hair blown around by the wind, and sits back in his spot with an order of a salad to keep him going.

Customers trickle in and Cas is busy, wondering how far Dean managed to go before he called him and turned him around. How fast he can make that time back up driving non-stop.

And despite waiting all day, it’s a shock “I’ll have the usual, thanks,” that sends Cas’s heart into loops and he turns from handing plates through the window to see Dean swaggering back in like he owns the place.

He gives Cas a warm smile, conveying what he seems to want to sell as genuine thanks for selling out, and then turns and heads straight for his brother, who is obliviously turning pages in one of his reference books.

He hears Eileen call him for an order, sounding like she might have said it before, and other customers are eating or chatting as cheerfully as anyone gets in this town. She tips her head when she sees Cas’s face, and signs – “Is it him?”

Cas doesn’t even try to answer, just grabs the plates of waiting food and uses the excuse to hurry across the diner, only glancing at the table in the far corner out the corner of his eye.

Sam looks up when Dean swings himself down into the seat opposite, and his face breaks into alarmed guilt.

Cas hands out the plates with a smile and doesn’t even mix up who ordered what.

The brothers manage to keep it quiet while Cas checks in with the table by the door pretty much just because they’re so far away rather than because he needs to, and then moves closer to theirs to get a dessert order from another table, and then he hears Sam snap, over the murmurs of conversation, clinking silverware and the radio chattering with the local station, “Maybe I wanted to be left alone!”

Cas turns his head away and tries to focus on clearing up empty plates from a now-abandoned table.

Clearly Sam had been packing up to go as they argued, because Cas doesn’t have any time to get out of the way as Sam suddenly comes past, swinging his bag onto his shoulder and incidentally right into Cas’s side. Cas stumbles back and Sam turns, making eye contact with Cas – he knows immediately it’s a mistake, that he has no poker face to speak of. Sam just huffs, an implied _I should have known_ in his expression.

He storms out of the diner.

Cas puts the plates he was holding down on an unused part of the counter and stomps over to where Dean is sitting, looking like a cornered animal to have Cas bear down on him so suddenly.

“Private investigator?” Cas asks, sitting down uninvited.

Dean throws up his hands in exaggerated despair. “Oh, come on, don’t you start. I thought you were on my side.”

Cas folds his arms on the table and leans over them to glare at Dean more forcefully. “You lied to me.”

“I –” The fight suddenly goes out of Dean, and he deflates, sinking back in his seat to look away out the window. “I was just trying to impress you. S-so you might tell me more. Doesn’t matter why anyway. Sam says he came here to be alone and didn’t want to be found. What do I do about _that_?”

It’s _infuriating_ that he’s miserably asking Cas for advice like he just assumes he’ll get it. It’s more infuriating that Cas feels like he has to answer. To defend Sam, he thinks, not to coddle Dean. “He may just need time, and space. Did he tell you why he moved here?”

“No, he just said he wanted to work in peace, then looked at me like I was gonna take up playing drums in his living room.” Dean sighs, aggravated. And tired. He looks like he’s barely slept since Cas first saw him.

Cas nods, his anger draining away. Not that he doesn’t hate that – but his sympathy towards Dean wins out, and he sits back, gesturing that he’ll listen.

Dean leans into the offer. “I don’t wanna drag him back to his old life if he was that unhappy, but I’m worried about him. He’s the one who slowed up talking to me, and any time I phoned him recently, he would have three word conversations… Haven’t even been able to drag him on a road trip for a year, and we used to do that all the time. I know when something’s wrong because I know him better than anyone in the world.” He pauses, watching out the window for a moment, and Cas lets him have that silence. Dean finally turns to Cas with a half-smile back on his face. “Like I had a gut feeling he might turn up here, with you and your shitty coffee. Just to spite me, I’d say.”

“If you don’t like the coffee so much, leave.”

“To where? Listen, I know bad diner coffee… Yours is gritty and weird. Something’s clearly up with the machine.”

Cas rolls his eyes. “I drink it all the time. It tastes fine.”

“Your tastebuds are dead.”

Cas gives up for now, because Dean is going to make him laugh and he can’t let him win outright. “So you’re going to stay in town?”

“Unfortunately. Look, not to drag Sam back or whatever. I know when he’s dug his heels in. Just… Someone needs to keep an eye on him, and that’s always been me anyway. It’s been too long since we hung out, we’re on different pages, and… I wanna get back on the same page, I guess. Doing this is something he has to do apparently, so here I am. Thinking of which, are you just sitting here looking pretty, or did you actually place my order?”

“I –”

“The service here is ridiculous.”

“I’ve never had any complaints.”

“Maybe no one else has taken a boat out to sea to find your manager to complain, like I’m gonna do first thing tomorrow.”

“In the meantime, I’m going to go make sure you don’t get your extra onions,” Cas tells him, and gets up.

No, he’s laughing, he definitely lost that encounter.

He insists on doing Dean’s burger himself, piling on the extras, and retreats to watch him eat it from the window.

Eileen throws a damp and oily wash cloth at him to get his attention.

“I think you fucked up. Again.”


	4. Chapter 4

Cas locks up later than normal, after he’s wiped down every surface and double checked everything with a diligence he hasn’t had since he started working there. He stands outside the diner, at its point in the middle of the bay, listening to the waves, watching his breath in the cooler night air. There are lights up either side of the seafront road, and he knows to one side the road trickles out into a series of cottages, summer houses for non-residents, really; the line is mostly dark at the moment this early in the season, but much further down the road than he’s used to seeing, a light is on behind a window. Probably the cottage Sam has bought, he thinks.

He’s half-tempted to walk up that way, to go apologise and explain that Dean had sold him a great big sob story and he’d fallen for it completely, hook line and sinker. He’s going to have to tell Sam that he just bought Volume II of it, if he does. He doesn’t think Sam would want to hear about why he listened to Dean instead of respecting his privacy.

The rest of his thoughts that evening, after Eileen went home with a final disappointed look at him, had been nursing the warm happy feeling of Dean finishing his burger, and pausing to catch Cas’s eye before he left, and saying, heartfelt, “Hey, thanks. See you ‘round.” Like the whole lying thing had completely disappeared because Dean winked at him.

As much as Sam’s pissed off at Cas for helping Dean zero in on him after a day and a half of attempting to live his new life, Cas has his own reservations about Dean, when he’s not sitting directly in front of Cas. And he should really make it clear to him that he would rather be on Sam’s side, if only to stop Eileen scowling at him. Dean’s not going to like to hear that Cas thinks that he made a mistake to call him and he regrets it now, and by the way, don’t you think Sam’s old enough to decide for himself what he does with his life?

Cas sets off in the direction of home, the opposite end of the bay.

The sea at night is a peaceful dark void of soft wave noises, the tide out and the lines of white foam on the waves widely spaced with the calmness of the sea. The sound of the waves to his footsteps usually lulls Cas into quieter thoughts when he’s stressed, a way to unwind at the end of the day.

Today each wave hisses at him that he’s walking the wrong way.

The B&B is a tall house on the corner of where the road out of town comes from between the hills and joins the promenade. There’s a strange car parked in front of it – a sort of double take, turn and check it out type of car, which Cas almost never does because he knows nothing about cars, but it’s an immaculately restored (or preserved) old car, so shiny the streetlights slide over her black paint, and into the gleaming silver accents. There aren’t a whole lot of cars like it, certainly not here…

“Yeah, she’s a looker.”

He knew it. Something about dogs and their owners, but with cars; not just because Dean and this car are the only new things in a town that does not really get new things, but “she” is just such a beautiful thing, because she’s clearly well-loved and Cas just _knew_ Dean is the sort of person who would pour so much love into something. He’s nothing if not affectionate.

Cas turns to see Dean wandering down from the porch of the B&B he’s holding a steaming mug in one hand and in the other a battered old paperback, one Cas recognises as one of the books from the ‘library’ - halfway up the promenade between the diner and Sam’s cottage, in the defunct bus shelter that now hosts an informal swap meet and trading post. These books are always being left in the diner, and it’s always Cas’s job to return them when that happens. He’s probably read the by-the-numbers thriller Dean’s holding a dozen times.

“You’ve been exploring,” he says, gesturing the book.

“There’s actually nothing to do here. I’m impressed. I thought, you know, there had to be _something_ , but I walked from one end to the other and this box of books was the most exciting thing to see. Sam really couldn’t have chosen a worse place to run to.”

“I would assume this is exactly why he chose to stay here. How’s the B&B?”

“Haunted. Hot chocolate is nearly as bad as your coffee.” Dean takes a sip and pulls a face as if to demonstrate.

“It’s haunted?”

“Leaky pipe noises, groaning, weird smells, somehow colder inside than outdoors – everything the people with haunted houses complain about on those ghost hunter programs on TV.”

“Maybe you should phone in and get someone to come exorcise the place?”

“Those hacks? Are you kidding? Me and my brother could do a better job than the friggin’ _Ghostfacers_.”

Cas raises his eyebrows.

“Yeah, uh, when we were teenagers we did the whole stay overnight in a supposedly haunted house thing with friends. They were all like, why are you bringing your little brother, he’s going to ruin everything… Of course once they were all screaming and pissing themselves about the ghost at two in the morning, he was the only other person actually with his head on straight.”

“So was it haunted?”

Dean shrugs. “When you’re seventeen and sneak liquor into a haunted house with a bunch of teenagers who mostly wanted to make out and prove they’re tough, then yeah, peer pressure, freaking out at every noise, that moment when you’re tired and it all seems too real and you kind of want to go home… You see some weird crap. I don’t _not_ believe in ghosts.”

Cas smiles at that. “I suppose you didn’t let Sam drink because of his age, if he was the only sensible one there?”

“Yeah – uh – don’t ask him for his version of the story. I’m probably going to look like a total ass if you do.”

“I’m pretty sure he’ll turn out to be the ghost if I do.”

Dean’s eyes widened. “...Huh. Son of a bitch.”

“You really trust your brother, don’t you?”

Dean’s face softens. “Yeah. We’ve been through a lot together. I mean, more than fake ghost houses.”

“I don’t think he’ll be mad at you forever. _Me_ on the other hand...”

“What did you do to him?” Dean’s big brother ire raises up out of nowhere.

“Told _you_ where he was. He was really furious at me when he left. It’s probably easier to blame me than you.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “I’ll tell him I hit you with the full Winchester charm and you didn’t stand a chance.”

Cas feels heat rushing into his face and he’s glad it’s dark and all the colour is washed out.

Dean still seems to notice, probably because Cas is standing there struggling to get out another word; he straightens up from leaning on the fence and looks Cas up and down one more time. “Well, I, uh, should probably go back to my room now you’ve reassured me all the ghosts are just made up by my punk ass little brother, but he can’t _possibly_ have had the foresight to prank me with century old plumbing. I’ll, uh, see you tomorrow, at the diner.”

“Goodnight, Dean.”

Cas is so overwhelmed with awkwardness he gives Dean a weird little bow, and turns and hurries on his way down the road, regretting everything.

God help him, he likes Dean.


	5. Chapter 5

Cas wasn’t sure what the next development he expected was, but it wasn’t Sam showing up the next morning while Cas was still turning on the coffee machine and other post-opening chores. He barely glances at Cas, and doesn’t look up when he comes over with the first pot of coffee of the day, just bows his head and tries to convey that he’s reading even more intensely. So Cas pours his coffee and stalks back to the kitchen, where Eileen is just coming in and putting on her apron.

Cas hands her his notebook. “Go take his order,” he signs, taking advantage of their silent communication while the diner is still quiet and words might carry.

“No way. Look at him.”

Cas glances over, to where Sam’s sitting in a patch of sunlight, apparently radiantly glowing or whatever Eileen sees. Cas sees him still scowling and trying to start work for the day looking as grumpy as Cas feels. “You can do it. Just smile at him and ask him what he wants. It will probably be pancakes again.”

“I know. I make all the food here.” She pauses and looks at Sam again, and her nervousness hardens into an excuse: “You’re the one who screwed up here, _you_ do the talking.” She jabs a finger at Cas’s shoulder for emphasis when she’s done talking.

“If I go over there, I’m getting his number for you.”

It’s a total bluff, and Eileen spots it. “What’s the point? I can’t call him.”

Cas looks over at Sam again, still oblivious to their argument and attention. “Do you think he knows that?” Cas has no idea if he’s even noticed Eileen mooning over him yet; he’s kept his head down even when he’s not been giving Cas a pointed silent treatment. If anyone was actually watching them gesturing to each other and peering over at Sam between exchanges, it would be obvious what they were talking about. But, Sam seems determined to ignore everything but the pages in front of him and the seagulls out the window.

Eileen huffs, yanks off the apron again, checks her face in a spatula and goes out to talk to Sam.

Cas sighs in relief. It’s his day off tomorrow and if he makes it through this, he can hide like a coward for a day and hope that Sam and Dean work out their issues so he’s not stuck in the middle any more.

Maybe Sam will go on a date with Eileen and she’ll talk Cas up for setting them up and he can be redeemed another way.

Eileen returns, and takes the jug of pancake mix Cas offers her; she’s smiling, anyway, although she avoids eye contact. Cas leans into it anyway. “You can also bring him coffee if you want.”

“Stop trying to matchmake or I’ll get revenge. I’m not blind as well. I’ve seen you talk to his brother.”

Cas retreats to the front of the diner out of sheer terror of what Eileen might do if he winds her up any more, to be ignored by Sam, and maybe do his actual job with some of the other regulars who are appearing.

Five minutes later, Dean taps on the window next to Sam, waves, and also gets ignored, in the way of Sam dropping his head into his arms with a groan Cas can hear across the diner, but Dean is protected from by the plate glass window.

Dean comes in and goes straight to the counter to sit down in the same spot he’d taken the first time he came in, pointedly not looking Sam’s way again, with the sort of petty air of someone who knows he’s taking the high road in an argument and trying to look magnanimous by not openly stirring shit.

Cas pours coffee, doing his own pointed not-looking in Eileen’s direction. The trouble with sign language is someone can tease you from across the room in great detail.

“How was the haunted B&B?” he asks. The clientele of B&B and diner don’t really overlap, so he’s genuinely curious about the experience. Far _more_ curious since Dean’s description last night. When he first came to town he’d stayed with a friend, who’d then sold Cas the house, so he’d never had to deal with it first hand.

“Awful. It has the classic shutters banging in the wind experience. I don’t know if that’s deliberately trying to be like a horror movie, but if there’s no ghost coming to eat you, it’s just annoying. And it’s freezing, and damp, and the owner is terrifying, and I’m pretty sure the other guest is _Dracula…_ Up all night thumping around. I half expected him to be playing organ music.”

“So, two or three stars on TripAdvisor?”

“I mean if you dig the bone-chilling terror, it’s probably kind of fun. More stars than I’d give _this_ place. Seriously, can I look at your coffee machine?”

“Do you actually know how to fix coffee machines?”

“Yeah, we had one like it at the office. My friend Charlie drinks about eighteen cups a day and wore it out in a month, and then it was my job to make it make coffee again before she killed someone.”

 “Sam mentioned her… You had an internet business?”

“Have, yeah. Well, no, she’s a game developer and I started out running the web stuff for her and the servers and the PR and so on. Not because she can’t do it but so she can focus on making computer games. I actually did a ton of work with her while I was still in town – all the design and stuff. Some of the coding. The coffee-fetching.” He laughs to himself, looking down at his current mug of coffee. “I only used to come to the office to test her games in between shifts at the garage and doing dog walking and odd jobs and shit. She got me helping out and taught me some stuff… I accidentally made a lot of money considering I just wanted to play video games with her.”

Cas is getting more bemused than he was when Sam first explained that, no, Dean wasn’t a private investigator. Dean actually seems to have enjoyed it, and smiles fondly just saying “Charlie,” so it seems unlikely she booted him out for being a loser. He hazards an inaccurate guess just to hopefully wring a straight answer out of one of the brothers at last. “And that’s what you do now?”

“No, I was doing on an architecture degree in another city and working nights at a bar.”

Cas tries not to look too surprised, but Dean catches it and rolls his eyes. Cas wonders how he can possibly explain that he’s not amazed Dean’s not an idiot because he just thought it, without suddenly turning this entire thing around on Sam, as if Dean has accidentally knocked a ball across the court to make Sam’s words sound hollow and wrong.

“Why did you do that?” he finally settles on, keeping the conversation neutral and obvious, hoping he’s not beading sweat on his forehead at the stress of this utter mess he’s left navigating around in total confusion.

“Uh, to pay rent and tuition without draining my savings dry?”

“I mean architecture.”

He shrugged. “Doing environment design for Charlie’s games was fun. It was like fifty fifty if I ever go make real buildings, or I just go back to work with her again but force her to pay me a lot more because I’m useful.”

Cas glances over at Sam.

Dean catches the eye movement, turns to look at Sam as well, then looks back at Cas and raises an eyebrow.

Cas hates that he’s predisposed to like Dean, a lot, because he caves immediately rather than have Dean think he’s acting cagily. “Does he know you’re doing a degree?”

Dean blinks at Cas for a moment, clearly thinking he’s stupid. Slowly, a sort of realisation crosses his face and his brows draw together. “I mean, he knows I moved cities and –” Dean pauses. Turns to look at Sam again. His face falls into deeper contemplation. “I tell him a lot of stories about working in the bar. It was much more interesting than telling him about my lectures and assignments…”

“Sam said you don’t talk about your lives much. I don’t want to tell you how to live your lives, but… It sounds like neither of you know that much about each other.”

“He doesn’t know I went back to school? Come on, I must have told him that. Maybe he just didn’t tell you.”

“I don’t know, he sounded pretty certain you mostly just hung out with Charlie playing video games until you lost your job because you were incompetent and lazy.” He winces at how harsh that sounds, knowing he’s put words in Sam’s mouth that were only conveyed in his eyebrows when they’d talked.

“But I didn’t lose – I thought he’d twig that I was also doing _real_ work there too...”

“Apparently not.”

“Well, shit.” Dean glances over at Sam, and sees his brother still working quietly, head bowed, blocking out everything. There’s just enough ambient noise in the diner that Cas doesn’t think the conversation would carry. “Okay, I’ll go talk to him. But, you know, casually bringing it up, not just stomping over and telling him he’s got it all wrong for years. I mean are your tables freaking bolted down? Someone’s going to flip one soon if they’re not.” He gets up and his eyes jump to the boards above the counter with the menu on. “Also, can I have sausages and hash browns? I’m going to need some fortification for this one.”

Cas nods, and watches Dean take his coffee over to Sam’s table. Cas makes sure Sam’s looked up and resignedly let Dean sit down rather than start making a scene immediately, before Cas goes to tell Eileen to put the food on.


	6. Chapter 6

Business slows and, whether the tables are bolted down or not, the brothers manage to talk civilly. Cas retreats to the kitchen and does Eileen’s share of the mid-afternoon chores in exchange for her watching the table in the corner and muttering what she thinks they’re talking about based on what she can catch. Sam keeps covering his face with his hands or turning away, and Dean’s back is often to the service window, so it’s rough going and Cas hasn’t got a clue if they’ve made progress. Dean’s shoulders suggest not.

When Dean has finished his breakfast he tactically retreats, Cas assumes, because they haven’t had a fight yet and leaving it there means they aren’t going to be openly feuding next time they talk, an improvement from last time where Sam stormed out.

Dean stops by at the counter in the now-dead diner. His smile looks forced but Cas doesn’t think it’s about him, when Dean asks, “So, about the coffee machine.”

“Okay, fine. You can look. You earned it.” It’s a pity concession, Cas tells himself.

Dean grins and comes around the counter, waves hi at Eileen through the window, and starts opening up the coffee machine with a reassuring amount of familiarity. Cas drifts to stand next to him, overseeing and knowing he’s going to be completely responsible if Dean breaks it.

“How did it go with Sam?” he asks. He shoots a glance at Sam, because he’s been doing it all day without repercussion. Sam is looking at Dean behind the counter with a sort of bewildered annoyance. He looks away quickly when he meets Cas’s eye.

Dean is poking at the coffee machine and doesn’t notice a thing. “He pretended he’d known all along that I was at college, but you know what, I think you’re right. He looked really surprised when I started talking about how this place was a nightmare of an art deco throwback and my favourite lecturer would probably take an axe and a can of gasoline to the façade.”

“Wow, you really hate it here.”

“Unfortunately, Sam loves it. He thinks it’s quaint, and quiet.”

“So you’re… okay with him staying here?”

“I’m not… _Not_ okay. I still don’t get it and he’s not opening up about it and I hate that because either he’s lying to me about something bad he did or he doesn’t trust me to know something bad that happened to him. But, you know, whatever. That’s his problem. I’m going to be here for him when he wants to open up. If I don’t get murdered in my sleep by Dracula first.”

“You could stay at my place.”

“What?” Dean looks up from messing with the innards of the machine, blinking and startled enough to jostle whatever he was trying to align right back out of place.

Cas stares back at Dean, catching himself back up to what his mouth just said.

It sounded an awful lot like he’d just invited Dean to come stay with him.

He’s _barely_ forgiven him for lying to him or how that should have been such a black mark in the first place that he’d make up whatever he wanted when there were no consequences, and, really Cas is being far too gullible with everything Dean tells him since then, taking it all as apparently complete honesty. Never mind how, even with the increasing bizarreness of what the brothers do or don’t know about each other, he feels like he should be on Sam’s side in this so it’s practically like fraternising with the enemy. At least in Sam’s eyes. He’s never going to forgive Cas for ratting him out if he takes Dean into his home right while they’re still working things out. As the guy with the coffee pot he’s supposed to be neutral anyway…

Dean’s awkwardly re-thinking it from his own side too: “I-I’m not angling for a place to stay. I mean, I have savings. I can stick it out at the B&B. I’m just… complaining.”

“You can’t live out of a B&B indefinitely. You’re kicked out for, what, eight hours in the middle of every day?”

“Which is conveniently all during your opening hours.”

“I’m going to go on my break soon and I’ll get you a key made. Be here at the end of my shift.”

His mouth is definitely not listening to his rational arguments that the objective observer part of his brain is coming up with.

“O-okay. Thanks.” Dean looks back at the coffee machine and then says, “Oh!” and hooks something up to where it’s supposed to be and clearly wasn’t – part of the mechanism between the water and the coffee, somewhere, Cas thinks, staring blankly at the mess of tubes and funnels that he never normally sees. Once that’s clicked into place, Dean puts the whole thing back together in a few easy moments, and flicks it back on at the wall. “There you go. Least I can do is stop you killing my brother with bad coffee if he’s going to sit here all day drinking an obscene amount of it.”

“It’s _not_ that bad.”

“Won’t be now. Anyway, I said I was leaving, so I should… go.”

“What are you going to do today?”

“I don’t know. It’s kind of scary. Maybe I should start writing a novel too. Go get a typewriter and sit myself on another table.”

“Don’t. This place will become a hipster magnet.”

“Yeah, I won’t. See you around.”

He’s still standing in front of the coffee machine with Cas blocking his way past, and it takes Cas a moment to remember to step back from lurking right at his shoulder and let him go; Dean squeezes around him, somehow turning on Cas’s orbit, and Cas rotates with him – Dean backs away, waves again at the door, and finally turns away and breaks eye contact only when he’s actually officially leaving.

Cas stares at the door for a good twenty seconds before he shakes his head, and puts the coffee machine back on so he can refresh the cooling pot.

It doesn’t make the weird gurgling noises Cas had always assumed was part of the way it worked.


	7. Chapter 7

Sam leaves before the dinner rush without having made eye contact with Cas more than once; Eileen stops mocking Cas for inviting Dean to live with him only because her shift is over; Dean returns an hour to closing and incessantly praises himself for fixing the coffee.

It’s been a long day.

When everything is off and tidy and the door locked, Dean stands by his beautiful car, which he’s moved outside the diner. He grins at Cas. “Need a ride?”

“You want to drive home? It’s a five minute walk.”

“I’m not leaving my Baby parked a five minute walk from home. I like to keep an eye on her. C’mon, get in. She doesn’t bite.”

She does growl, though – and Dean manages to drive too quickly even though he’s barely got up to speed when he has to stop and park. Cas feels like the whole town has probably rolled their eyes at hearing this car rumbling along the promenade. He wonders if anyone will spot him riding shotgun and have something to say about it next time they’re in the diner. He’s already had a few curious questions about the new faces in town, although Cas has tried to do nothing more than confirm that they’re brothers, and that yes Sam is apparently writing a novel, don’t go bothering him while he’s trying to work.

It probably won’t be long before someone asks him very carefully if one of the brothers is now living with him.

He gets out the car and looks at her parked in front of his house like a great big neon sign reading ‘GOSSIP’, and sighs.

They’re on the far end of the bay, a road that splits off from the promenade and rises up along the side of the hill above the seafront houses; Cas’s house is far enough along to have an uninterrupted view of the water; the houses beneath are roof-level to his road.

“Is this expensive?” Dean asks, looking around with raised eyebrows.

“It’s all paid off. I won’t charge you for more than something fair for the utilities.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

Cas brushes past him to unlock the door, since Dean’s just standing there eyeing up the real estate and not moving.

The huge wooden door sticks in the damp weather, which this spring has had in abundance, and Cas has to give it a little shove with his shoulder before he can let them in. Dean follows close behind him, blinking when Cas flicks on the overhead lights.

Once he’s got a look around, Dean whistles like he’s never seen anywhere fancier in his life, the sound echoing through the hall. “I _love_ what you’ve done with the place.”

“You can go sleep in your car, if you like.”

“I’m sorry, I really dig the uncarpeted ‘been meaning to get around to painting for thirty years’ vibe. Really matches the dumpster dive furniture and TV on its own box kind of aesthetic.”

“I never had time to move in properly. And it’s all clean and second hand.”

“Yeah, empty crates generally are… Aw, come on, don’t look like that. I’ve genuinely lived in worse. Sammy and I moved around a lot as kids, and not exactly on the biggest budget. It almost feels nostalgic. Do you have a bookcase that’s a bunch of cinderblocks with planks between them?”

“Bricks.”

“Classy. Woulda killed for one of those when I was a kid.”

“I have good kitchen appliances. And all the plumbing and electricity and wifi are totally normal.” He gestures the router sitting alone on the floor in the hall, next to the phone socket.

Dean phrases his next question a little over-cautiously, Cas thinks, trying not to take offence. “Where are you planning to make me sleep?”

“Uh. The sofa is a pull-out. If you’re planning to live here more long-term, I suppose you can claim some rooms upstairs and we’ll get you some furniture.”

“Cas, if you take me furniture shopping, I’m making you get yourself some real furniture. At gunpoint if I have to.” He sighs. “I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Sam’s still pretty pissed off at me for staying here.”

“You mean you might consider leaving?” Cas feels a little panicked flutter of sadness at the thought. He says to himself, for Sam’s sake that Dean would give up so easily after all his big talk about staying to help. Perhaps his own disappointment that maybe Dean is only what Cas feared after all. The flaky loser of Sam’s original description. The guy who’d lie about being a private detective to make himself look cooler and more competent than he actually is.

“No, that he’s going to dig his heels in and I’m still going to be here trying to wheedle out if he’s okay or not come Christmas. I mean we’ll be able to have this argument for months.” He heaves a great combination sigh-eye-roll, but switches gears and speaks again before Cas can get in his intended question about Dean having a life to get back to eventually: “Did you say, _rooms_ upstairs?”

“It’s a huge house, and I really don’t need all this space. I just use the kitchen, downstairs bathroom, that living room there, and a room at the back to sleep in. That’s not even all the downstairs rooms.”

“Wow.”

“You can have the second floor as an apartment if you like. Unofficially. I’m not entirely sure of all the rules about the lease, and subletting. I never thought this was permanent.” The last comment comes out a bit too much of a despondent admission.

Dean raises his eyebrow but thankfully stops teasing Cas. “Can I go look?”

“The rooms are empty.”

Dean shrugs, and drops his duffel bag in the hall, and heads off up the stairs, his footsteps echoing – like the rest of the floors, they’re unpolished wood, exposed after being under carpets for years, splattered with paint and other stains from past building work, and at least on the stairs, lined with sharp carpet staples that stayed behind when it was ripped up.

Cas follows, forced into introspection on if he’s never done it up because he takes too many shifts at the diner to have time, or if he takes too many shifts at the diner so he doesn’t have to deal with his house.

“This bathroom isn’t half bad,” Dean’s voice comes from above, slightly muffled as he sticks his head into the room to investigate. “I wish there hadn’t been a fad for eggplant coloured bathtubs and toilets, because who the hell said, ‘you know what makes me feel clean and relaxed? _Muddy purple_ ’ but hey, I’ll take it.”

Cas joins him on the landing, as Dean wanders around peering into empty rooms. The master bedroom for the house – far too large for Cas to ever have wanted it all to himself – has a spectacular view of the bay at night time. Dean crosses to the window without turning the light on and leans on the sill. “I could get used to this,” he admits.

Feeling hesitant, but still pulled in Dean’s magnetic wake, Cas joins him at the window, standing close enough Dean’s shoulder brushes his side. Cas bends down to squint out across the bay. “The light on the end is Sam’s,” he says, gesturing.

“How do you know?”

“He, uh. Told me he bought the cottage on the end.”

“He _bought_ a cottage.”

Oh, yeah. Cas has definitely accidentally told Dean yet more information that will do nothing to improve how Sam feels about him once Dean uses it in their ongoing argument.

“Please don’t hassle him about it. I mean, until he tells you.”

“You good?” His concern surprises Cas – he thought Dean would have been more worried about all his crap with Sam, who obviously was a bigger emotional weight on Dean’s mind. Cas would have _understood_ if Dean missed that Cas wasn’t just telling him off for worrying.

“I think Sam hates me.”

“Sam doesn’t hate people. Come on. It’s _Sam_.”

“Well, I don’t know him all that well, but he looked like he hated me after he realised I called you and ruined his peace. He ignored me all day today.”

“Hey, I’m not ruining anything. I gave him hours today to do whatever he wants and now I’m moving in with the grumpy asshole from the diner to not impose on him. I _could_ have demanded he put me up on _his_ sofa while we went a hundred rounds on this argument.”

“How charitable of you.”

“Look… I’ll talk to him. But it’s not gonna happen right now, ‘cause he’s not here. And I’m not gonna phone him up like, hey, so to clear some stuff up about the guy from the diner you’ve started a vendetta against… Cas is actually kinda nice and weird in a good way once you get past all the scowling and eye rolling.”

“But you still think I’m an asshole.”

“The first thing you ever said to me was basically ‘fuck off’, so, yeah, you’re an asshole.” Cas opens his mouth to argue but Dean pushes on. “In a good way. Although it makes me wonder if that’s _all_ you think you did to make Sam apparently hate you…”

“I was much nicer to him than I was to you.”

“Well maybe that’s the problem. You can keep sulking about this if you like, but I’ve barely slept for, like, a month, and I’m going half-crazy, I’m not even sure you’re not an axe murderer and I’d have been safer in the Dracula-infested B&B, and Sam can wait until morning. I promise. I’ll have a word with him. Let him know you were only doing what you thought was right.”

Cas looks back out of the window across the bay, and then back at Dean, who is smiling surprisingly fondly at him. Cas’s heart picks up speed. He’s amazed that Dean cares so much, caught out by how irreverently he talks about everything. He’d _sounded_ reluctant and put upon. His face tells another story. He’s still teasing Cas.

“Okay.”

Dean grins and slaps him on the arm. “Great, come on. Let’s stop moping around in the dark.”

“I’ll set the sofa up for you, but I’m taking the first shower. I usually do it as soon as I get in. After I’ve been in the diner all day and I’m close to setting fire to all my clothes if I have to smell grease any longer.”

“No, no, it’s fine. You smell fine.”

“I smell like oil and hamburgers.”

“Yeah, that’s… fine.”

Dean looks away to focus on walking down the stairs, with a bit too much care not to look around again. The backs of his ears are very red.

Cas watches him, bemused, and has to back track to get clean sheets out of the linen closet, after following Dean several steps more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not as far as I'd written when I decided to start posting, but is the most natural break while I work on the next section, of which I have several scenes already. It might be a short break, but I want to have the next natural section of the story ready to post a day at a time again when it's ready. 
> 
> Thank you all for reading so far <3


	8. Chapter 8

Days off normally involve waking up bleary and confused about which century it is the one day Cas doesn’t need to set an alarm. This morning he snaps awake, and when he checks his phone, groans to see it’s barely past seven.

Noises from the kitchen – clattering of pans and badly out of tune whistling – are the culprit. Though Cas is at the back of the house, his door is ajar and, being in a small room down the long passage through the centre of the house, sound echoes all the way to him from the rest of the house. It seems like he’s almost next to the kitchen. He probably should get carpets installed. It used to be a perk to still hear the TV clearly from the bathroom.

He struggles out of bed, drags his robe around his shoulders and goes to investigate, or tell his new house guest to shut up.

Dean had so far proved a thankfully boring guest; he’d been crashed out face down on top of the blankets Cas had spread on the sofa, in the time it took for Cas to have a quick shower. He hadn’t stirred for the rest of the evening as far as Cas had been able to tell. It seems like this is the other shoe he has been expecting.

“Morning, sunshine,” Dean says, not looking around from nosing around in one of the cupboards, when Cas shuffles into the room and greets him with a “ _Dean_.”

“Did you know,” Dean continues, “You haven’t actually got _any_ food in this house except your impressive stock of emergency canned goods? At least I _hope_ they’re in case of hurricanes and that’s not all you eat.”

“I eat at the diner.”

“Does the diner even function when you’re not in it?” Dean slams the cupboard door and turns to look at Cas. He does a double-take, eyes darting up and down Cas’s body, then forces his eyes up, right past Cas’s face to the high ceiling with its curling paint. “D-do you sleep naked?”

“Yes. It’s healthy.”

“You do know you have a housemate now?”

“I –”

“ _Dude_ , get the hint you’ve left the barn door _wide open_.”

Cas rolls his eyes and tugs on the edges of robe. “There’s nothing offensive about nudity, you know.”

“Yeah but you – I – Never mind, can you just from now on, _please_ put on boxers or something before you go into the public parts of the house? God, do you wander around butt naked in the summer? _Don’t_ answer that.”

“I’m going to go get dressed now.”

“Yeah, you do that. Then I’m taking you off to get food, furniture and fucking _pyjamas_.”

Cas retreats back to his room in a daze. After he closes his door harder than he meant to, he’s belatedly hit with a wave of embarrassment. It was like he had forgotten normal human social standards, never mind how strange things were with Dean to begin with, in his morning grogginess and distraction with resenting Dean for waking him up. Strictly, it’s Dean’s fault with that reasoning. But that doesn’t cheer Cas up that he made himself look ridiculous in front of Dean, _again_. And talk about an advertisement for living with him.

But when Cas sheepishly comes back out into the hall to find Dean waiting for him, Dean grins at him like he’s genuinely happy to see him, all the earlier weirdness completely gone with his seemingly changeable moods. “Do you really have nothing else to wear that isn’t dishevelled dress shirts? Because I have to say, I’m sensing a real wardrobe monotony from you.”

“Not really.”

“Well, come on then. I think I owe you breakfast after the show you gave me this morning.”

“What s – oh.” Cas finds himself blushing again, but Dean just opens the door and lets the horribly early morning sun stream in from outside. He wanders out into it to roll his shoulders and sigh contentedly in the warmth.

Cas goes straight past him and several paces down the road before he turns and scowls at Dean. “Come on, if I have to be awake this early, I need coffee.”

“We’re driving. We can go straight to whatever nearest town doesn’t rely on a single tiny general goods store, and a thrift shop in what looks like a shack, to get everything. Maybe they’ll have a place that sells real coffee too and I can show you the difference.”

Cas can’t work up the energy to defend the town from that accusation as he drags himself back up to the car.

He has never been more aware of the eyes inside the diner as when they pull up outside. It’s not long after opening, but Sam is in the usual corner seat. Looking out the window. Cas turns hastily away but probably not fast enough, and trudges after Dean into the diner.

Benny’s daughter from his first marriage is working today – Elizabeth fills in as a third member of staff on busy days and covers when Eileen or Cas have a day off. She’s technically their boss but she's much younger than Cas and Eileen. She also greets Cas with a cheerful “Heya, darling,” when he comes in.

Dean says hello to her too and turns to grin at Cas as he follows him too closely at his heel to a table as far from Sam’s hearing as possible. Dean’s grinning a bit _too_ enthusiastically once Elizabeth has poured them coffees with another warm smile at Cas, and left them to it. “Is that your girlfriend, then?”

“What? No. She just works here when I don’t.”

“What about the other one? The one you’re always conferring with at the back?”

“Eileen? No, she’s a dear friend but we were never like that. And I think she likes –” Cas stops himself short.

Dean puts down the menu he’d only just picked up. “Go on,” he says, smiling dangerously now.

Cas refuses to say anything but he can’t stop his eyes going to Sam, in the background of Cas’s view of Dean. He’s also watching them suspiciously, which doesn’t help.

Being as embarrassingly elder sibling as can be, Dean looks right over his shoulder, and waves at Sam. “I should go say hi.”

“Please don’t repeat any of this to him.”

“Nah, scout’s honour. Of course… I was never a scout. Hm. We’ll see how it goes. Anyway, I promised you already I’d try and fix things with Sam. If your girlfriend comes over, tell her I’ll have the short stack and bacon.” He slides back off the bench seat and wanders over to greet Sam. Cas can’t see his face, but Sam looks fed up before Dean even reaches him.

Cas pretends to read the menu despite knowing every item on it and kind of liking the sound of pancakes himself, mostly because if he just sits there and tries not to watch Dean, his wandering gaze has only one place to go – inevitably to where Eileen is presumably watching.

She’ll probably ask with a perfectly straight face how it was having Dean stay the night.

Dean returns after a horrendously long couple of minutes, and takes a gulp of coffee as soon as he sits down – Cas has already half-finished his mug with a combination of stress drinking and just really needing coffee to begin to process this all properly, but Dean gags and looks like he’s contemplating spitting the coffee back out before he makes a hugely exaggerated swallow, followed by a shudder and revolted face, clearly begging Cas to ask.

“What’s wrong with it _now_?”

“It’s _thick_.”

Cas tips his mug, and watches the little drift of coffee grounds at the bottom slide around, in a kind of gel of coffee solids. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“No offence, but I don’t value your opinion of coffee at _all_. Ugh, can you order a sieve and another mug for me?”

“No.”

“Can you go into the kitchen and _get_ them?”

“I don’t work here today. I’m a diner civilian.”

“I bet that has _never_ stopped you getting up to get more syrup or something before today.”

Cas laughs, and changes the subject. “What did Sam say?”

“Not a lot. I told him I hoped it wasn’t going to be weird but I was staying with you until further notice, and then gave him your address in case he needed to get hold of me in an emergency, and then when he was still looking at me like I’d grown an extra nose, I made a joke that you were my next of kin if I died at sea, and bolted.” He takes another sip of coffee and pulls a face. “I have no idea why I did that.”

“Are you planning to go to sea?”

“No. What?”

“What?”

Cas tips his head in bemusement while Dean raises an eyebrow in disbelief.

Elizabeth shows up with their pancakes, putting an end to that conversation.


	9. Chapter 9

They hit the road within the hour, fuelled up with pancakes and the uncomfortably firm coffee (Dean’s words).

The road out of town winds through the hills for a way before heading down and joining a larger road running north-south, the one Dean had travelled slowly down and rapidly back up while looking for Sam.

While they’re still escaping the immediate area of the town, there are several large and mostly abandoned farmhouses off the winding road; many with their land swallowed back up by trees and standing alone in their yards, mouldering and peeling. Dean slows the car at the sight of each one, looking curiously at them.

“They’d make _amazing_ haunted houses,” he comments. “The whole look of the porch around the entire building, and those attic windows…”

They drive on, until the next dirty, dented mailbox is coming up on the side of the road, seemingly all alone with nothing but trees behind it, the entrance to the land hidden. Dean taps his hand on the wheel in agitated thought, letting the car coast again. “Hey, do you mind if we stop and look around one?”

“Why?”

“I’d love to make a model of one of these. I would need to get some photos, and really explore the interior. Figure out the floor plan and stuff. There’s a lot of houses like this all around this area, and it was driving me crazy I wouldn’t have time to have a look, before I knew I’d be staying. When I was coming through here the other day, I was so intrigued by how scary they looked in the dark with all the horror movie pouring rain, but I didn’t stick around to give them a good look. Because I know when you’re about to get eaten by pissed off ghosts and that was the time.”

“What would you do with a model of the house?” Cas asks blankly, picking that of all the things that really need examining of what Dean thinks and says. He’s assuming Dean doesn’t mean a physical one, but it seems to serve even less purpose to him if it’s digital. At least a model one you could put on a shelf.

“Charlie was talking about going into virtual reality games when I spoke to her last. If we did a proper haunted house experience… I bet that would be so much fun to play. You know, a night in a haunted house simulator.”

“Did Sam scar you for life with that time you told me about?”

“Look, the B&B and your echoey suspiciously-cheap-with-no-carpets murder house have been dredging up memories, but they’re unsettling in different ways I don’t think would market well. A house like _that_ is classic.” He gestures out his window.

While they’ve been talking he’s rolled his car to a stop in line with the gap in the trees by the property’s rusty gate. A once-blue house is sitting in a little patch of weedy waist-high grass, its windows broken, the roof missing many shingles, and all the paint flaking off in huge chunks.

“It’s a death trap.”

“It’s _perfect_.”

Cas sighs. “It’s still way too early in the morning. I wouldn’t even be awake yet normally. So why not. We have time to spare.”

“And, obviously, first thing in the morning on a sunny day is the least likely time for ghosts.”

“Of course.”

Dean rolls the car onto the grassy verge and parks her properly, grinning like it’s Christmas morning. Cas follows him around to the back of the car, where Dean’s got the trunk open. He heaves out a second duffel of similar wear but not a matching set to the one that’s as of now still sitting in the hall where Dean left it, spilling flannel shirts – this one is partially open and lands heavily on the verge with ratting from the stuff inside. Cas can see rope, part of a solar lantern, a sleeping bag that rolls up into a small bag, and other camping gear.

Not bothering with any of the perhaps necessary survival gear, Dean hooks his finger into a secret place and pulls up the floor of the trunk, revealing a second layer hidden underneath. There’s a laptop case, a few shoeboxes and other small containers, a bulky camera case that Dean pulls out and –

“You weren’t kidding about the guns?” There’s a couple of old shotguns, practically antiques, that Dean immediately tucks back under a cloth when Cas points them out.

“Uncle Bobby likes hunting, and he’s a paranoid bastard. Didn’t like me sleeping in the car one bit, but he said if I was gonna do it, least I could do is be ready for the worst, else he’d shoot me for being so damn stupid. ‘Course in his liquor-soaked head I can’t work out if the ‘worst’ is being attacked by regular old junkies or, like, the Hook Man.”

“Is he why you have a false bottom on your trunk as well?”

“Ah, no, that was Dad’s addition long before he gave me the car.” Dean tosses the empty camera case into the regular part of the trunk after returning the other duffel, and closes the trunk firmly. He seems suddenly very interested in turning his camera on and checking all the settings, so Cas assumes question time is over, though he thinks he’s going to need a few takes at it to cover everything from just how often Dean slept in the car to what on earth his father did to require a false trunk in the car.

Dean makes it several steps ahead of Cas while he’s still staring at the back of the car, wondering about the life he’s only strangely intersecting with (and if he’s going to be a weird story and unexplained thing in Dean’s past some day) and he only looks up when he hears a shutter click; Dean’s testing the camera by pointing it directly at him.

It’s an expensive camera, with a proper long lens and a large flash on top, but held together by lots of carefully applied tiny squares of duct tape, like it has been dropped and shaken all over the place for years. Despite the rough treatment, it’s clearly an important possession of Dean’s, if he’s taken that much care to repair it, and hides it with his less easily-grabbed belongings.

“You just going to stand there looking pretty? Because a shoot of you leaning all over my car could be fun but not exactly what I planned for today.”

Cas trails after him, as Dean contemplates the rusty gate, seemingly sealed shut by climbing plants, wobbles it thoughtfully, then just clambers over it with a shrug. Cas struggles after him – at least Dean’s slowed up beating a path through the weeds, taking a wide circle the long way around to catch every angle of the house in the morning sun. Cas can just follow his trail. It’s peaceful walking for a while, but he has a lot of questions and Dean’s too distracted taking photos to keep up his usual monologue filled with a few answers and a whole lot more questions.

“Do you do this a lot?”

“Sometimes. A lot of urban exploring, when I was in the city. It’s way more dangerous than _this_.”

“Except for the ghosts here.”

 “Except for the ghosts. You ever broken a law, ever?”

“Why do you sound so sure I haven’t?”

Dean looks him up and down and laughs, as they reach the front steps at last.

“You have a certain… demeanour. Look, I don’t really follow the news, so, just be straight with me, did you once, I don’t know, try running for president or something and when it didn’t work out, go hide in some middle of nowhere town and hope no one recognised you from the TV?” He’s still chuckling to himself at his joke as he starts up onto the porch.

“Dean – be careful!” Cas grabs his shoulder and pulls him back as the first step splinters under his weight. Dean stumbles back against Cas, but no harm done. Cas pushes him upright more angrily than he meant to, while Dean’s still looking up at him in shock. “You could have broken your leg!”

“It’s one step.”

Cas looks at the sharp, long splinters in the wood where the step has partially indented in a low V, saved from caving in completely under Dean’s foot by Cas’s quick action. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea. We have no idea how dangerous this house is.”

“It’s fine, now I know how bad the wood is on the stairs, I’ll tread a bit more carefully.” He tests the edge of the second step with his boot, right by the railing, and goes slowly. When he’s safely on the drier porch, sheltered by the overhang, he gestures victoriously. “You coming?”

Cas gingerly picks his way after Dean, and joins him where he’s taking photos down the length of the porch. “One creaky swing seat on here, and we’re golden,” he says. “Get the door.”

After a brief wiggle of the handle, Cas announces, “It’s locked.”

“Freakin’ hell, how did you live if you didn’t ever get a B&E sneaking into abandoned buildings trying to impress a girl you wanted to hook up with,” Dean mutters, turning his attention to the window. “Thought that was like, the universal experience.”

“I never –”

Dean reaches through the broken pane and has unlocked it in a moment because he hauls the sash up with an awful screech that drowns out Cas’s grumpy reply. Dean sticks his head in. “At least all the broken windows stopped it getting too musty in here,” he says, muffled. He withdraws his head. “Here, hold my camera. I’m going in.”

He climbs through carefully, and Cas can tell he’s sort of exaggerating it for his sake, but at least he’s stopped rolling his eyes. He straightens up on the other side and sticks his hand back through for the camera, gesturing wordlessly until Cas realises that’s what he’s asking for – he’d almost put his own hand in Dean’s.

Cas tentatively sticks one leg into the room and then gets confusedly stuck working out how to manoeuvre all his parts in through the little space. Dean’s hand sticks out again, and Cas feels even more baffled until he tentatively tries placing his own hand in it for real this time, and Dean pulls and supports his weight until Cas has made it. He straightens up still clutching Dean’s hand, standing right in front of him, nearly toe to toe, and it takes a long breathless beat for Dean to loosen his grip and jostle Cas into remembering to let go as well.

Dean stumbles back a step, to a loud creak from the floorboards. “Be careful!” Cas warns him, but nothing terrible happens.

Dean shifts his weight around, listening to the creaking, not mocking Cas’s fear, but testing. “I think the inside is a lot better than the outside. Just keep an eye out for any huge damp patches where stuff has been leaking and we should be okay.” He raises the camera on its strap, and takes another point blank range photo of Cas’s face, probably caught expressing his grumpy disapproval of all this, before turning away to start documenting the room they’re in.

The house seems to still be partially furnished, and Cas doesn’t know if that’s creepier or not – he mostly sees a sad and abandoned place, dirty and damp and starting to grow weeds under the windows, ready to be reclaimed by nature in however many more decades it takes for the field to eat the house.

But then, he has, as far as he knows, never watched a horror film so he wouldn’t know what the standard is for creepy rather than sad.

The last owners of the place had probably taken the heirloom furniture they couldn’t leave without, but they’ve left a large wooden sideboard, built into the wall, either because it was too large or they had no time to pry it free. A particularly ugly plate set remains behind too, in smashed shards all around the room. They’re probably not the first people to have broken in here, and that also makes Cas sad. At least there’s no graffiti on the walls. Perhaps the others who’ve been here before were mostly exploring, desire to smash the ugly green china aside. Perhaps the last owners did it.

Through the large archways between this room, the hall, and the sitting room, he can see a mouldering sofa and armchair have also stayed behind, decaying so far that the backs have slumped down and the cushions are thin and covered in black mould. He wanders through to see what state the kitchen is in, leaving Dean to photograph the room from every angle, including ones no one else would ever need, of the dusty corners of the floor and the moulding (and mould) on the ceiling.

Approaching the kitchen causes a flurry of skittering and small noises – the room _looks_ clear when Cas peers into the dirty green-and-yellow tiled space without daring to cross the threshold and risk disturbing the old counters and cupboards, sagging with damp and decay, but there’s a weight of maybe hundreds of tiny eyes on him from somewhere or another. He wonders what the health and safety worst case scenario is with him bringing diseases back to the diner. He hasn’t touched anything except the floor with the soles of his shoes and the window sill as he climbed into the house, but he desperately wants a hot shower as soon as they get back to civilisation.

Dean follows him to the living room, and takes another photo of him. “Sorry, you pull some great faces.”

“I hope the haunted houses you went to make out in as a teenager were cleaner than this.”

“We put a blanket down, of course,” Dean says, eyeing the sofa. “Or my jacket, in a pinch.”

“That’s very noble of you.”

“Well obviously I would take the time to run out to the car and get the blanket _now_ because I’m not a horny desperate teenager any more. Got a bunch of candles too, if you like ‘em.” He waggles his eyebrows at Cas.

Cas looks at the sofa again and shakes his head in disbelief.

Dean snaps another photo of him.

They head upstairs when Dean is done with the downstairs rooms, and done documenting the stairs, a creepy larder, and they’ve both agreed the creepy basement door can go last and stay on the to-do list until they’re ready to go down there.

“Obviously it’s the worst part of the house, so if you were exploring it in a game, you’d want to hide the key somewhere near the top of the house, and save something really nasty for down there. We’re basically doing the walk-through now. Hopefully monster not included.”

“Obviously,” Cas agrees. He’s never played a video game in his life, either, and has even less of a clue how they’d work. But that seems a fairly simple concept.

The upstairs seems cleaner, but the boards under their feet are much creakier, and Cas scowls Dean into agreeing to walk slowly and not get lost in taking photos and not watch his feet.

Dean laughs in nervous horror when they uncover a sagging crib in the first upstairs room they open. “This writes itself,” he says. “I’ll pay you ten bucks to go over and look in it.”

“You go look in it. It’s your game.”

“I will give you a research credit on the game.”

Cas goes to look, mostly because Dean actually sounds spooked. “It’s empty.”

It’s only when he turns around that he sees Dean hasn’t even stepped into the room yet. He takes a photo of Cas in there, then joins him, and takes another, facing more towards the window and well away from the crib.

“Am I not in your way?”

“No, it’s fine,” Dean says, and moves around Cas closely, even though the floorboards groan and creak and Cas wants to step away so they’re not putting so much weight all in one spot. When he backs off, Dean follows, and takes another photo over his shoulder on the way out of the empty room, without really looking.

Cas goes to check the next room and leave Dean to the delights of the bathroom – the final upstairs room would be the master bedroom but it’s empty of everything, though it has large windows catching all the morning sunlight, that have left it drier and airier than the rest of the house. Cas goes to look, to see if he can see the road and the car from here, or if this is all a strangely self-contained dream. The click of a camera shutter announces that Dean’s joined him.

“Wait, stay there,” Dean says, when Cas turns to see he’s pointing the camera at him, and instinctively moves towards him again.

“Why?”

“The sun’s catching your face in a really nice way. C’mon, model for me?”

“Do you actually know anything about photography?”

“Not really, but it worked great as a pick up line on vapid attractive people on campus when they saw my big camera,” Dean says, laughing. “Of course, not that I ever really got around to taking photos of any of them once I got them back to my ‘studio’. Don’t look like that, they always knew it was actually my bed.”

“I wouldn’t have.”

“You’re trusting. And weirdly literal about some stuff. But still smarter than all of them put together, I would think. Come on, loosen up a bit, undo a few buttons, go back to moodily looking out the window – okay that’s too many buttons. Uh. Okay, great.” He moves closer, shutter on the camera clicking repeatedly. “Look towards me a bit more… God, you look so...”

“Striking?” Cas suggests, the one description of himself he’d ever liked reading.

“I was going to say ‘devastatingly handsome’.”

Cas kind of likes that one too, but only because of the way Dean said it.

Dean snaps another photo of him laughing and looking away, feeling heat rise in his cheeks. He hears the camera a few more times and when he risks another look, Dean’s back to work diligently recording this room. He looks much happier than he did after the creepy baby room took some of the swing from his step.

“Hey, why don’t you go see if there’s a way up into the attic, while I finish up here?”

“Are you sure you got my magazine cover photo yet?”

“Ah, no, that’s the one where you’re spread out on that gross old sofa with nothing but a corner of the car blanket for decency. We’ll save that for the end. Forgot the blanket, you know.”

Cas is pretty sure he’s joking this time, even if he kind of spoils the joke by biting his lip and looking Cas up and down way too thoughtfully. “Fair enough.”

“Although if you want to run out to the car and get it...”

Cas leaves the room, laughing. He’s used to people around him being attracted to him – or at least, who they thought he was – but, friends or… not… Dean is the first person it feels comfortable with, that they’re playing around with this concept but it’s not weird, or that Cas has to force anything or give anything in return. Dean seems to like that he’s only got an eye roll or bemused laugh in response to every time he hits on Cas. He really doesn’t seem to expect more. (He certainly shouldn’t expect that Cas would sit on that sofa, clothed or not.)

He can’t even get the attic open; it’s got a trapdoor that pushes up from below, and they’d need a ladder for it. Dean admits that’s fair enough and he can model the empty space from his imagination easily enough without seeing what’s up there.

The cellar door doesn’t even have a lock on it, and creaks open to reveal a cold, mildew-smelling darkness. Dean pulls a flashlight out of his pocket and gestures for Cas to stay close behind him, as he leads the way down, testing every stair with genuine nervousness. When he’s near the bottom he shines the light around the room a few times, taking in a general impression. “Can’t see any skeletons; guess they’ll show up in the camera flash and we won’t know until I put them on my computer when we get home… God, I sound like the idiot who dies at the start. Stop me if you think I’m about to unleash an ancient evil.”

Cas is too busy clinging to the back of Dean’s jacket, and pretending he isn’t even if Dean probably knows full well that he is, to really weigh in on that. Dean raises the camera. “Uh, can you hold the light for me? And shut your eyes, if you don’t want to be dazzled.”

Shutting his eyes means curling his hand around Dean’s arm and squeezing it for the sense of anything around him in this cold, awful darkness; his eyelids light up in red flashes as Dean rotates carefully around, nudging Cas when it’s time to move. He can feel his nails digging into his palm in the hand clutching the light, and he hopes he’s not gripping Dean’s arm so tightly.

“Okay, I’m done. We can go.”

That’s all Cas needs to hear to locate the stairs and start up them, dragging Dean with him.

When they have sunlight falling on their faces again, Dean smiles at him. “Thanks for coming down there with me. I’d probably have pissed myself and run screaming when I saw all the thousands of spider webs in the flash if you weren’t there.”

Cas discards the information about the room they’d just been in without allowing himself to process it, and focuses on the conversation. “You wouldn’t have. You’re brave.”

“You think I’m brave because you’re here.” Dean’s doing the fond smile at Cas again that makes his stomach flutter. Cas turns away to investigate a hunch that the front door can be opened from the inside, right as Dean sways into his space; he has to catch himself with an urgent step forwards that makes the floor creak and splinter ominously.

“I don’t wanna fall in the spider basement,” Dean says, with genuine fear in his voice, and Cas yanks the front door open and they escape onto the porch, laughing in relief.

They’ve got halfway back to the car before Cas suddenly wonders if Dean was about to kiss him.


	10. Chapter 10

The rest of the trip is banal and filled with the grumpiness of trying to complete a full grocery shop between two people who have no idea what the other really likes, when one of them has no interest in cooking outside of the diner they work at. Tensions get so bad, devouring all the good feeling they started with, that Dean eventually snaps, “Just pick a cereal you like and I’ll worry about the rest,” and the mood from earlier seems effectively killed. Cas wonders if Dean is upset that Cas didn’t kiss him, but for once in his life he’d had a great save for not reading the mood and he’d thought it was going to keep him in the clear. Maybe Dean just resents the house for scaring away whatever moment he’d thought they had.

Despite the threats about furniture shopping, Dean’s pissed off enough that once they’ve filled the back of the car with groceries, he heads right back out of town, only stopping to pick up lunch from a drive thru. Cas sits staring out the window for the rest of the drive, picking at his burrito in defiance of Dean’s no food in the car rule, not helping the situation by sulking, but he’s so worried Dean will change his mind and go live at the B&B again he doesn’t know how to snap out of that mood. He has no idea what will fix it. He looks away when they drive past the particular abandoned house they’d stopped at, and thinks he’s not imagining that Dean speeds up the car anyway.

Unloading a dozen bags of groceries somehow helps make Dean and his presence in Cas’s life seem more real, as well as their moods seeming to improve after eating properly. Dean’s joking again, and seems quite at home taking over Cas’s entire kitchen, not asking once where he should put anything, and just deciding new places for things that Cas has never stocked anyway.

When that’s all done he goes out to the car again and returns with his camera and laptop, and leaves stuff all over the kitchen setting up at the table, which, he complains, is the only flat surface in the house and Cas needs to get a desk too – apparently still buying furniture for the house in his head. Cas cedes the room to him, but is too happy about it to argue, going to put on the laundry and leave him to it, hoping Dean’s planning a whole list of furniture to buy.

It’s only mid afternoon and he’s not sure what to do himself. Normally on a day off around now he’d just about be feeling human enough after a shower, a couple of hours of mindless television and instant coffee that he’d leave the house to get something from the diner for a very late breakfast. Then maybe read there, or head home to deal with laundry… His life suddenly feels very small, which once had been exactly the appeal of living it like that.

“I think I’m going to go for a walk,” he announces, coming back through the kitchen. It’s probably for the best not to glue himself to Dean now he’s apparently living with Cas. He’s rapidly losing objectivity, and it’s the time of day Eileen might have light enough work to humour him with  the conversation with another human who isn’t Dean that he urgently needs.

“Knock yourself out, I have to sort through all these pictures,” Dean says, barely looking up from his laptop. He’s rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt and has put on a pair of thick-rimmed square glasses to work on the computer.

Cas thinks about how Dean might have been about to kiss him earlier, and feels kind of dizzy to look at him. It hardly seems fair that he just appears in Cas’s life like this; that someone more deserving should have got Dean, but instead he’s here in Cas’s kitchen messing with a camera and pouting at the screen on it, and Cas of all people gets to pause in his doorway and watch him do it.

Objective conversation, Cas thinks, and flees.

Of course, the problem with the diner is that it doesn’t just have friends in it – it has Sam too.

More specifically, it has Elizabeth leaning at the counter reading a magazine but actually looking over it and smiling, and Eileen standing by Sam’s table, beaming at him, turning one of his books in her hands, watching him as he speaks about as happily as Cas has ever seen him so far.

Cas walks right past the diner and slows to a dawdle, just enjoying the warmer spring day and letting the sea talk peacefully to him. Maybe it can’t talk any sense into him but it can calm his mind for a while.

He goes right up to the end of the road, looking at the small houses along this way as more than just part of the background of the town; they’re mostly quite depressing at this time of year, empty and shuttered or deliberately boarded up in case of winter storms while the owners are away; though the storm season is drawing to a close, most leave it a few more months to return. Not all of the owners will return – Sam had a fair choice of houses because each year it seems someone else doesn’t return. A couple of the cottages _are_ lived in full-time – one of them is Benny and Andrea’s, but they live in reverse to the rest of the town, disappearing out to sea when the weather gets better, and have already done so this year after a warm April, not bothered by the rain.

The houses also get much smaller from their end, with less and less land attached, going from the seafront to Sam’s, which Cas discovers is the second to last right at the end, where the road is starting to leave the sea behind in a slope upwards to the hills, and is dwindling to an unmade track. There’s a small hybrid car parked awkwardly badly in the drive of the second to last cottage, about the least likely-sized car to be Sam’s that Cas would ever have guessed, but he’s never seen it before in his life, and new things don’t just appear in town without comment.

Feeling like a stalker at this point, Cas goes up to the nearest window and squints through it. Sam seems to pack less lightly than Dean, at least. The same make of laptop, and Cas wonders if they know that about each other, is closed on the sofa. Boxes of books are stacked against the back wall, obscuring its window and view of the garden – he knows because they’re labelled “BOOKS” in Sam’s spiky all-caps writing. There is categorically not room for a dog. There barely looks room for a Sam.

That thought makes Cas feel like he’s information gathering for Dean and he guiltily moves away with a stern message to himself to at least not share this with Dean before he has a chance to find out for himself, and carries on walking along where the road turns into a path and the path goes up into the hills, following the edge of the cliff along until the next town, where, according to locals, its only redeeming feature is it’s then the path back to this town. Up here, though, just around the corner from town, it’s a nice place to stand and watch the ocean – the bay is sheltered by its hills so well that only certain angles of storms bring in the big waves, but the waves crashing against the cliffs are full strength, no matter the weather. They’re noisy enough to drown out Cas’s thoughts for a while, and he feels almost meditative when he turns around and heads back.

He sees Sam walking up the road when he’s only barely past his cottage. If Sam had been looking he might have seen that Cas hadn’t come directly from peering in his windows, but Sam hasn’t been looking, he’s been daydreaming. It offers Cas an opportunity to run and hide if he wants, and he is beginning to dread the idea of talking to Sam, but that somehow feels more dishonest than how he knows his face is going to betray being caught in the act regardless of how long he had stared into the ocean between snooping and now.

Cas keeps on walking, resolving to tell Sam a partial truth that he had just come up here, as he does, to enjoy the cliffs.

Sam nearly walks into him before he realises who is approaching him from up the road. The distracted smile drops instantly from his face.

“Oh. Dean’s not with you?”

“Uh. No. Sam –”

“No, it’s okay, you don’t need to apologise.”

That sounds suspicious. Cas narrows his eyes.

“I mean,” Sam continues. “I’m starting to feel like this whole thing was a set up – of all the freaking towns here, Marv sends me to the _one_ Dean already has a friend living in? How do you even know him? Or do you know Marv and you’re doing this all as some messed up favour to him? You know what, it doesn’t even matter. My entire life, I did _one_ thing for myself, and that was running away, and now it turns out I didn’t even have any free will in that either?”

“Dean cares about you,” Cas says, baffled about whatever else is going on in Sam’s conspiracy.

“Yeah, and I don’t care – I mean, I care about _him_ , even if I don’t know if I can forgive him for this either. But I don’t care about you, okay? I’m staying here, and it’s not because I give up or I think what you did has become okay somehow because I like this place aside from you, or because Dean’s going to wheedle his way back into my life like he always does. I’m staying here _despite_ you. So you can apologise and play nice and bring me coffee all you like – it’s not going to be worth anything to me to make me forgive you for tricking me.”

Sam pushes past Cas and stomps off in the direction of the cottage. Cas stands frozen until he hears the door slam. It jolts him guiltily to start hurrying back into town.

He feels truly sick now – hearing where his choices led him, and how angry and hurt Sam is. And he’s _wrong_ but there’s no way for Cas to show him that; he can’t prove to him that he never knew Dean or had never heard of Marv, whoever he is, because Sam’s not going to trust a word he says right now. It makes him dizzy again about having Dean living with him, but not in the giddy way he’d felt when he set out on the walk.

Now he wants to evict Dean, to push back and show Sam that he’s as stupid and confused as anyone else and _no one_ is to blame, but everyone’s been hurt. Dean doesn’t look hurt enough, and Cas kicking him out on Sam’s behalf would ruin his week as thoroughly as Cas and Sam have wrecked each others’. But it’s not _Dean’s_ fault either, and Cas has no idea if he can hurt him like that just to prove a point to someone he barely knows but once hoped would value his opinion.

Even walking up the hill as slowly as his feet will take him, he still has no idea what to do about this. Perhaps he should just explain everything as slowly as he can to Dean, and make it his problem to fix – Sam’s _his_ brother after all and Cas has hit a wall of helpless frustration on reasoning with Sam.

He lets himself in and Dean’s right in his line of sight, looking up from his computer, smiling at once.

“Hey, nice walk?”

“Yeah. How are the pictures?”

“Great. I kind of want to set my laptop on fire and salt it for good measure just looking at some of them. And those were just your glamour shots.”

 “Funny.”

“You want to see them?”

“Sure.”

“Tough luck, I sent them all off to Teen Vogue already. God, I’ve been staring at this screen for hours. Do you want to go get a drink?”

“I think I need one.”


	11. Chapter 11

Dean leads the way to the bar, confident around the town like he’s lived here for years, rather than showing up for the first time just a few weeks ago.

Cas trails behind him, feeling guilty and working out what he has to say to Dean – what he has to _do_ about this. Maybe kicking Dean out is too extreme, but, well, things are moving way too quickly. Whiplash quickly, and Cas hasn’t even processed that Sam and Dean showing up in town have changed his life irrecoverably, though he sort of knows it in a dazed way that that if they just up and left tomorrow, he’d still be thinking about Dean when he’s old and grey, and waking up in a cold sweat over how awful things turned with Sam.

And it’s Dean’s fault, for how things have tangled up here, even if this Marv they’d both mentioned seems to be the source of their angst somewhere off in the wider world the Winchesters live in. But if Cas hadn’t been so taken in by Dean’s charm he wouldn’t even have suggested taking his number – he wouldn’t have called him when Sam came. He wouldn’t have taken Dean’s side for no logical reason. He wouldn’t have asked Dean to live with him, and followed him around for a day, getting more and more hopelessly entangled in his life.

He hadn’t realised until now how much it had been bothering him, that he feels so relaxed around Dean. He hadn’t planned to invite him to stay with him; he’d meant to freeze him out as soon as he realised that Sam’s picture of his brother didn’t match up with the one Dean had painted of himself, but whether it is Dean feeling crappy about Sam doing the same to him without Cas’s help, or the earnestness that Dean exudes all of a sudden, but Cas feels like he’s with a different person to the man who’d shown up late that night in the rain. A more real person. None of their stories match or make perfect sense, but what Dean is telling him seems true, at least to his heart.

And Cas is fascinated by that heart.

The town is too small to come to any conclusions before they reach their destination.

The room is as crowded as it gets on a Saturday night – that is, there’s still room to sit at the bar, but a few people are playing pool at the only table, and there’s enough chatter to fill the corners of the room. Dean leads them to a pair of bar stools near the far end.

“I like this place. Perfect amount of weird clutter on the walls. Less of the creepy photos your diner has. I dig the whole fusion cuisine look of weird cabin on the edge of the haunted woods, and fisherman’s watering hole.”

Cas ran his eyes from the deer head on the wall directly above them to the nets and buoys over the bar. “Well, we _do_ have the sea on one side and the forest on the other.”

“Sea monsters and Big Foot – it’s the variety in what might eat you that’s important.”

Cas laughs to himself, and Dean gestures the bartender over. He watches nonplussed as Dean grins at Jamie with his familiar charm.

“Hey, we’ll have two beers – thanks.” It shouldn’t work but just a wink has her laughing and rolling her eyes like he’d said something hilarious.

Cas thinks Dean might have already been to the bar since he’s been in town.

“Sure thing, honey,” she says. Her eyes finally let go of Dean and drift past Cas as she turns away to the fridge. She actually does a double take. “Oh, you managed to drag Cas out the house?”

It’s still addressed to Dean, and yet Cas does sort of know Jamie. After a few years in the town as one of its sort of unofficial public figures, he’s got to know the others; he and Jamie find themselves in similar situations when asked to participate in town events, because of their reach among townsfolk. He’s been to the bar before, but only for business to talk festival plans with her and several others (she gets particularly enthusiastic about planning Oktoberfest, probably because she loves the costumes). Sometimes they drop by at the start of business hours to warn each other of drama among their customers that started at one establishment and will probably spill over to the next.

He probably ought to have warned her about Sam and Dean. At least, to speak carefully to them, and not fall in love.

“Hello,” he says pointedly.

Dean pulls him into a loose sort of hug with an arm around his shoulders, more to shake him demonstratively and show they’re connected than to actually be a gesture towards _him_. “Cas kindly let me stay with him while I’m in town. I’m just showing my thanks with a drink or two now.” He winks at Cas.

“Well now I’m jealous if he cooks for you in the morning,” Jamie laughs, and finally moves away to grab their drinks.

“I’m not going to,” Cas says when she returns, way more grumpily than he means to. He’s always respected Jamie, seeing her as working a similar gig to himself but with beer instead of pancakes and burgers. He has no reason to resent her except now she’s hanging on Dean’s smile and it hurts to watch.

“Well, have fun, boys,” she says, with another playful smile at Dean, and heads off down the other end of the bar where someone needs her.

Dean turns to Cas, smiling at him with the exact same smile, and tips his bottle as if waiting for a toast, apparently thinking that was no big deal or that he shouldn’t have flirted like that in front of Cas… He wonders if Dean is just like this with everyone and there’s nothing different to how he just talked to Jamie, and how he’s been treating Cas; maybe it offers an answer to the piece of the riddle about what Dean has _done_ to him.

“How did you do that?” Cas asks, instead of acknowledging him.

“Do what?”

“You… attracted her. And you –” He doesn’t know what to express what’s bothering him, if he’s making himself look jealous over nothing, and is quickly realising this is apparently not socially acceptable to mention, when Dean’s eyebrow raises. “Are you like this with everyone?” Cas mumbles, knowing he regrets saying it.

Dean looks genuinely flummoxed for a moment, looking back at Jamie as if trying to work out what he’d even done, before staring at Cas again, as if he’s never quite seen him before, spluttering over a couple of attempts to speak before he gets to his answer. “C-c’mon, it’s just good manners to harmlessly flirt with the cute bartender, if you’re not creepy about it. I should know, I get it all the time when I work these sort of jobs. It-it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Like how you told me you were a private investigator.”

Dean laughs at that, looking embarrassed, and drinks before answering. “I suppose. You were flirting back, in my defence.” He looks away, smiling. A coy glance out the side of his eye catches Cas’s expression that’s almost certainly frozen in a sort of uncomfortable frown, and Dean’s face drops too. He looks at Cas again, but more critically. “I haven’t been barking up the wrong tree this whole time – you _were_ flirting, weren’t you?”

“I –” Well, he’s already realised he was, although _why_ and to what end he hasn’t worked out. It has all rushed together into a series of questionable decisions which have got Dean far closer to him than he’d imagined would ever _actually_ happen when he first fantasised about letting Dean stay on his sofa the night they met. It’s like they’ve skipped ahead several chapters from where Cas thought they should start, and some things are becoming urgent to discuss that he would have sat on for months otherwise, all the awkward stages of courtship he normally manages to repel people at. It’s ruining the thrill of Dean seeming to admit he was seriously flirting with Cas, and defending that over what he was doing with Jamie as something more meaningful. Maybe this is for the best – a way to get rid of Dean’s interest in him and to settle the whole situation down, stop it from careening off into such stormy waters. A no-blame way to make Dean back off. Win win? Cas feels sick again and Dean is staring at him, waiting for the answer. “I don’t – I don’t flirt with people.”

“Never? Come on, everyone – nearly everyone… I mean, come on, you look like an ex-wife sort of guy, you’ve got to have – how do you – you know, hook up with people?”

Cas takes a long drink before he answers. “I don’t.”

“Like… ever?” Dean looks like he’s too busy struggling with the concept to be judgemental, so there’s that.

“I never had occasion. My life was busy and I didn’t see it as important, or understand why my colleagues would be so distracted by it. I took it so slow with my college girlfriend we never – it wasn’t her fault we parted.” He casts a sideways glance at Dean. “Or the ex-wife. I wondered if when I came here and things were quieter for me, I might find the time, but it seems I’m just not interested. People don’t draw me in in that way.” Present company, still raising eyebrows in disbelief, excluded, he supposes. “For example, I know Jamie is objectively extremely attractive, by our culture’s standards, but I don’t… I don’t feel whatever it is that makes you and her talk to each other like that.”

“Animal magnetism,” Dean says, rolling his eyes slightly at the phase even as he uses it. He glances down the bar and grins at Jamie, who seems to know to look around at him and wave as soon as he turns his attention on her. He looks back at Cas and grimaces apologetically. “It really just sort of happens. You don’t have to be jealous of her.”

“I’m not.”

Dean shrugs and takes a drink. “Well, I’m just saying.”

Cas stares at him, while Dean focuses on dragging his thumbnail through the damp label on his beer, like he’s being paid to shred it. This is not what Cas was expecting. Dean’s thinking hard, but all Cas’s confession did was make Dean reiterate immediately that he prefers Cas over Jamie? He should have shrugged and said, yeah, maybe I should stop chasing you and go for someone compatible with me.

They’d probably be an adorable couple.

“What does it feel like?” Cas asks, the words coming too quickly, making his heart thud to ask it. “Being attracted to someone?”

To Dean’s credit, he looks pretty awkward to be put on the spot like that, choking down his mouthful of beer, and looking apologetic again to Cas as he searches for the words, looking Cas up and down, blushing. “I don’t know, like… I think someone’s hot, and if they seem into me, that makes it exciting like anything could happen when we’re together. I want to make them feel good even if it’s just making t-them laugh – and if they like me… I wanna sweet talk them, spend all my time with them, find out how far this goes. It’s really intoxicating.”

“You feel that about… a lot of people?”

“I mean… Most people I meet who are remotely within my type – I mean this is most people so I don’t get lucky remotely as often, but _most_ people I’m _kind_ of attracted to, potentially, I at least wonder if they are giving _me_ any signals, like, what would my chance be here, if they weren’t, I don’t know, stuck a car over in traffic in a different lane heading to a different city. But at least I got someone hot to think about for the next three hundred miles of empty highway out of it and they’re just a fun fantasy. No… eye magic moment that makes that spark happen.” He smiles to himself as if remembering something, and shakes his head to clear the thought.

He glances down the bar again, checking Jamie’s still out of hearing. “Sometimes the signals are so blatant I don’t need to think about it – i-if Jamie had been working the night I came into town… We wouldn’t be having this conversation now, I guess. Guess I’d have gone home with her, driven on in the morning… Never come back when you called because I’d never have got as far as Andrea’s… But that would have just been a fun hook up, no strings attached, a sort of… pick me up night or something while I was stressed out of my mind looking for Sam. Probably would have gone back with you if you’d asked instead of trying to make me go stay at the creepy B&B. I mean, only sometimes all the signs work out and it turns into…” He stops and checks to see he hasn’t missed any spots on his beer label.

“What _did_ you think about me, then? That night?”

Dean blinks at him. “Wow, you really don’t need to drink a lot to start asking the hard questions.”

Cas shrugs one shoulder, but he takes another drink, if it will make Dean feel better about this. “I thought you were fascinating. I wanted to invite you to come sleep on my sofa so I could get to know you better.”

“No innuendo?”

Cas shrugs one shoulder. “Not really.”

Dean laughs to himself, shaking his head. “I thought… He looks pretty straight-laced, in a pretending to have a stick up his butt way, but, you know, just dishevelled and snarky and self-aware. I thought if I could get you to a bedroom, you’d probably be _really_ freaky. I thought you were giving me all the signals. Couldn’t figure out why the hell you kept… I don’t know, dragging things out because you got off on the suspense. You’ve never, ever been attracted to anyone?”

Cas shakes his head. “I think I may have… ‘had a stick up my butt’, as you say, about it. I used to think it wasn’t fair I didn’t like someone back in the same way they liked me, even if I was very fond of them. I kept waiting to see if it would change and I’d want what they wanted… It didn’t happen. I shut everyone out after that, and it was easy to do because I was busy and, well, not interested.”

Dean nods sympathetically. “I get that. Shutting people out, I mean. Avoiding falling in love and skipping town if they get attached… Been there, done that, was a total asshole… Okay, probably not comparable to your shit.”

Cas shrugs. “I was an asshole too. Only… very, _very_ recently, I have started to see that might have been wrong about what I can have and I’ve been an idiot.” He very pointedly meets Dean’s eye, and sees his reaction in the smallest detail, as realisation – or hope – crosses Dean’s face.

Dean’s eyes dart away from him for a moment, and then do a double-take down to the end of the bar. “Shit. Sam”

“What?” It’s like ice being dropped down the back of his shirt. It’s not a warning – Dean sounds worried.

“He’s hitting the bottle.”

Cas surreptitiously looks over his shoulder, belatedly realising how much he’s turned into Dean’s space as they talked. Sam has a glass in front of him filled quite high with whiskey. A double that he’s already made progress on.

“Is that bad?”

“He’s great for a few beers, but he never hits the hard stuff unless he’s really messed up and wants to get trashed. I mean, he’s a hell of a cheap date if you buy him whiskey. And it always seems like that’s what he drinks when he’s trying to drown his sorrows…” Dean glances back at Sam, and to Cas again, and heaves a sigh. “Sorry, mood killer. I have got to go talk to him. I’m not going to let him drink alone, at least.”

“You don’t have anything to apologise for. It’s why you’re in town. I should leave you to it. I doubt he wants to see me.”

“Yeah, uh. We’ll work on your PR problem with him. But time and a place.”

Cas nods, and gets down from the bar stool, finishing his beer as he does so. Dean picks his up and smiles helplessly at Cas. “Catch you later.”

He reaches across and squeezes Dean’s shoulder. “Good luck with Sam,” he says, and leaves him to it.


	12. Chapter 12

The cold air, filled with the salt smell of the sea, wakes Cas up instantly from the strange dream he’d been in with Dean. The beer’s left him with nothing more than a slight light-headedness as he walks home, but the memory of pushing Dean into that frank conversation belatedly chases him with embarrassment, for opening up and for pushing Dean for all the details he did.

It never bothered Cas to talk about sex before, because it always seemed quite hypothetical and didn’t fluster him to think about it when it was just some natural process that happened – but not to him. It isn’t a thought he holds with pride that he’s above everyone else – just matter-of-fact that it isn’t something he thinks about or needs. Truth be told he hasn’t even thought about _sex_ with Dean, but he unsettles Cas in a new sort of way. He talked to him just a few times before Dean was making him act recklessly and obsessive like, well, like he _likes_ Dean in a really stupid way, which from everything he’s ever been told about life, sounds like a crush.

Perhaps he was too practical and forward – it hadn’t seemed weird to invite him to stay, to ask these questions… And liking Dean beyond his better judgement is a good way to be sure he hasn’t just been irrationally hoping they could be friends.

He knows how that feels – the reasonable hope for a new friend. He’s still shaken by how badly things have turned with Sam, but he’d been hoping that his life would be changed not just by Sam’s brother.

Cas has basically only Eileen in the entire town who is regularly around him and the same broad age bracket and similar interests – that is, from out of town and knows what it’s like in the wider world not just from dropping by and visiting, but coming here and finding the town strange and yet welcoming. It isn’t that he is bored of her, because he is truly fond of her and grateful for her friendship, but she is one person, and until this town, Cas has never really known loneliness between various structures of work and family and school that were like beehives of activity and people around him who knew him, who he knew, in seemingly endless numbers. He doesn’t want to drive her crazy by following her around all day or inviting her over every evening, when she has her own life to live. Sometimes they stick around and play cards after work, or she invites him over because there are too many baked goods left over from the diner and only slightly out of date for her to eat by herself. Hours of putting up with each other in the diner is more than enough aside from that. Given Cas’s record with forming new social connections it’s a miracle they clicked. And probably the hard work was on Eileen’s part to make it stick.

Sam had seemed like a chance to potentially double his number of friends, but Dean had happened to him first, before Cas even realised what he’d done and what effect it had had, and it’s… off-kilter. Charged. Cas knows he is irrational about Dean, and he knows, intellectually, he would have chosen the quiet, introspective and messed-up-in-ways-he-relates-to brother to be closer to if not for… whatever it was he felt for Dean. A compulsion to be closer to him.

He hasn’t come up with any real conclusions about it all when he gets home. So he makes himself a cup of tea, gets ready for bed, and takes a book to be his companion to curl up with and fall asleep. He’s exhausted, and it comes easily.

Dean wakes him up several hours later, coming home noisily, making Cas startle awake with a fear of home invasion until he remembers that someone else has a key now.

The front door thunks too loudly, and Dean’s footsteps meander around the house like he’s trying to sneak from the hall to the bathroom and back to the kitchen, though every creak betrays him and he thumps around when he reaches his destination, with awkward pauses like he only remembers too late he’s trying to be quiet.

Cas has no idea what the time is and he’s too tired and grumpy to care. His alarm will go off when he needs to get up to go to work no matter what, so he tries snuggling down under the blankets, and pretending he can’t hear every sound of Dean knocking the cup of toothbrushes into the sink and swearing about it.

Finally the footsteps creak down the hall – not heading towards the living room but to Cas’s room. He groggily pulls the blankets up to his ear, irritated and sleepy. He _knew_ there was one roll of toilet paper left out and getting thin, and he’d prefer Dean trashed the bathroom looking for where he hid the spares than come wake him up. Regret that he’d wondered earlier if he should leave a replacement out and hadn’t soaks through his half-awake mind, and he hopes this doesn’t lead to weird dreams that this is what he’s more upset about now than anything more dramatic happening in his life.

Dean pushes open the door. Loudly. “Hey, Cas? You awake?”

“Mmmph,” Cas says into the pillow.

He hears rustling fabric, and what he thinks is the soft thump of Dean dropping his jacket on the floor. He sits on the edge of the bed, and the whiskey smell rolling off him hits Cas, as Dean struggles to pull his boots off.

Cas sits up and puts the bedside light on, squinting sleepily as his eyes adjust.

Dean _looks_ drunk; unsteady and unfocused. Struggling to get the second boot off.

“What are you doing?” Cas asks, too tired to deal with this.

“I wanted to say sorry for ditching you earlier.”

Dean really does make him stupid. He forgets why he’s annoyed _now_ and asks, “Is Sam okay?”

“Yeah, I mean. Probably not. I kept up with him drink for drink until he was pretty much under the table. Turned it kinda fun but he still didn’t tell me why he was even here. Carried his sorry ass home and nearly got fucking lost walking back here.” Dean finally manages to yank his other boot off.

“ _How_?”

“Forgot about the hill.”

“Right.”

Dean scoots up to lean against the headboard, sitting right next to Cas now. “Ran out of road and it’s just me and this little jetty and the ocean. And I think there’s seals on the beach. Are there seals on the beach?”

“Yes,” Cas says, staring at Dean just settling down into his space like he belongs there, perfectly comfortable to sit shoulder to shoulder with Cas on the bed. It makes it incredibly hard to think, or breathe. There’s a part of him that knows he should shove Dean away now, and make him go sleep on his sofa. There’s a part of him wound up tight with the possibility that Dean is going to try drunkenly kissing him and how bad that would be because Dean can’t really be responsible for that. And worse, because Cas kind of wants to play stupid that it might happen, then act surprised and push Dean away.

“Good, because I was getting kind of worried about what else would be making those weird dog noises that late at night. Got me thinking though. The ocean, I mean, not… wondering about the seals.” Dean sighs, looks down at his hands, and then back up at Cas, his expression open and vulnerable. “I really like you, Cas. I mean really, really like you. I mean, I was gonna hook up with you tonight, or that was the plan when I asked you out. Think I was still gonna try’n make it work after you dropped that bombshell. Still want to.”

He smiles more for himself than Cas, some private thought that makes him bite his lip for a moment, before his face falls. “But I can’t right now. I mean, with Sam and all. I wanna give you all I got. Dates, long walks on the beach, all that crap. I hate that sort of stuff, but I couldn’t just love you and leave you. You care about crap. I think you care about me. You care about _Sam_ and you helped me more than you know. I don’t mean I gotta start following Sam around town all day on suicide watch because, I mean, he wants to write that bloody novel. He’s not _that_ bad, thank fuck. But he’s alone and miserable and I wasn’t there for him these last few years, and I’ve got to put him first. At least until I know he feels like I’m there for him again. When he doesn’t act surprised or like I want something from him when I am. And I ditched you to prove that to him earlier, which was still shitty of me whether you’re freakishly understanding and kind or not, so I know I can’t – I can’t be what I want to be for you, or what I think you deserve. So. Um. I’m not freaking out because you said you were a virgin, okay? That’s not what this is. I just need time.”

Cas stares at him, mouth open, replaying all the parts of Dean’s slightly slurred speech through his head again. “You… You said _all that_ because you were just worried about what I’d think if you said you needed time?”

“Yeah,” Dean mumbles. “I don’t want you to think I’m judgy.” Bit said, he seems to have completely run out of steam, head drooping.

No, but if he remembers half of what he said tomorrow, he’s going to have morning after regret about baring his soul. “I know you’re telling the truth, but I would have understood if you felt hesitant anyway even if Sam wasn’t a problem.”

“Nah, it’s… making me even more curious about you. Still wondering what the fuck you did with your ex-wife though.”

“Daphne and I had separate rooms. It was… a business arrangement. My family didn’t like me being thirty and unmarried. I still send her a Christmas card every year.”

Hysterical silent laughter rocks Dean for way too long, long enough for Cas to roll his eyes and regret saying anything, as Dean wears himself out, still laughing to himself as he nods. Cas jumps as his head falls on his shoulder. Dean seems for a moment like he might have fallen asleep, but then he moves to nuzzle against Cas’s neck. “God, you smell good even when you haven’t been at the diner. Makes me want a burger right now.”

“Dean...” Cas tries to push him away gently by the shoulder, laughing at how ridiculous Dean is being even when he’s nervous of what he’ll think later. But Dean slides an arm around Cas’s waist and pulls himself closer – pulling Cas down so they’re laying with Dean half on top of Cas, snuggling up to him and hooking a leg around him over the covers. Cas gives up, when he realises Dean seems to just want to cuddle.

“I thought you said you wanted space.”

“Said time, not space,” he mumbles.

Cas huffs, and tries to sound annoyed still, when Dean is smiling against his skin.

“I may have just made that up right now because I don’t wanna get up,” Dean adds.

“You can stay if you like. I don’t mind.”

Dean mumbles something incomprehensible and shuffles down a little more to get comfortable. Cas reaches away to turn off the light, then tries to work out what to do with his arms; how far he wants to encourage Dean. How much he dares to touch him right now. He thinks he really should wait for him to pass out properly, then nudge him over into the empty side of the bed to sleep it off, so that Dean doesn’t regret getting this close in the morning. He settles for freeing his arm trapped under Dean to rest over his back, his hand in Dean’s hair, stroking gently. His other hand he places over the one Dean has on his chest, and he tries not to smile too much when Dean laces their fingers together, not long before he starts really snoring.

He supposes there’s a first time for everything, and being the unsatisfied date is something karma owes him in spades.


	13. Chapter 13

When his alarm goes off not a long time later, Cas wakes up alone and it takes him a moment to remember why that’s strange, as scattered dreams about the cliffs and the sea and Sam crammed unhappily in a doll-sized diner booth and Cas pacing back and forth on the orange and yellow tiles of the diner disorient him on what he’s supposed to be panicking about.

A nervous feeling drags him out of bed to make sure that Dean hasn’t fled.

He’s in the kitchen, staring into the fridge and rubbing his head.

“Morning,” Cas says.

“Ugh.” Dean closes the fridge, gives Cas a once-over look and dramatically averts his eyes. “Goddammit I forgot you slept naked.”

Cas looks down and sees his robe isn’t even hanging open indecently, just in a dramatic V-line. “You’re being ridiculous.”

“I’m too hungover for this. I just wanted to fry some bacon. And then eat it. And now I have to deal with this. You were naked last night, weren’t you?”

“You slept with the covers between us.”

“Right, because that’s… totally not weird. You could have warned me.”

“You drunkenly crawled into my bed and started cuddling _me._ You could have warned me you’re a sentimental drunk.”

“Wow, last night I really forgot how much of a dick you have – are. Dick you… are.” Dean’s eyes drift downwards again and stick there.

Cas scowls, and adjusts his robe, but thinks he might have somehow won that round.

Dean closes the fridge, clutching the packet of bacon he’d been searching for like a lifeline, and Cas ends up sitting at the table to watch him cooking, assuming that Dean can’t possibly want to eat all eight pieces of bacon he layered into the largest frying pan Cas owns. Dean turns and smiles at him with that fond look that appears when the snarking is over.

“Do you want coffee?”

“That question doesn’t really have a ‘no’ answer.”

“Got it. Please tell me your coffee machine is better than the one in the diner.”

“It’s the old one from the diner.”

Dean hangs his head for a moment, before dragging himself over to investigate.

“Hey, uh, Cas… I’m sorry about last night.”

“You already apologised but you didn’t need to, it’s fine. Helping Sam is why you’re here.”

“No, I mean… For what I said. I was being panicky and weird. And I didn’t ask what you wanted, just assumed… I don’t know. I assumed.”

“I was more upset you woke me up than anything.”

“Got the hint, the coffee won’t be long. I think.”

“But you were right. I shouldn’t have to compete with Sam for you.” Cas picks at the loose threads in the towelled fabric on his sleeve, seeing Sam’s angry face lurch at him again as if they’re still on the path by his house. Feels the injustice of Sam’s misplaced anger again. He’s a block between them on either side. “But I can compete with _you_ for _Sam_.”

“What?” Dean nearly drops and juggles with the spatula he’d just picked up to tend the bacon. “Uh –”

“I’m going to find out why he moved here _before_ you do.”

“Come on, fat chance. He’s my brother. I know him better than anyone.”

“What’s his novel about?”

Dean’s mouth snaps closed. He blinks a couple of times, then gestures at Cas with the spatula. “I bet you don’t know either and you’re bluffing.”

Cas refuses to back down, raising an eyebrow.

Dean huffs and turns to jabs at the bacon with agitation. “He hasn’t told you that, and he’s not gonna tell you before I get it out of him.”

“He’s allergic to telling you anything, and it’s probably because _you_ don’t tell him anything about yourself either. He didn’t know that you’d gone to college!”

“I had a good – I would have – Never mind that, you said he hates you so why do you think you could get anything out of him?”

Cas gets up, heading back out the room. “I’m going to be late to open up the diner if I don’t get dressed now. If you make a bacon sandwich for me I can eat it on the way. And all Sam’s books he carts down to my diner every day are about monsters and the occult. It doesn’t take a genius to work out he’s writing a horror novel about _you_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again after a little flurry of updates I actually have to go on work on the next scenes, so there'll be another little break on this. I'm really enjoying writing it though so I hope it won't be long. :) Thank you for reading and commenting this far! <3


	14. Chapter 14

Sam sprawls out across his table, and doesn’t look up when Cas pours coffee.

He’s amazed Sam even came to the diner, two hours later than normal, dragging himself in like somehow his hunched shoulders were the only thing holding him up, the rest of his body trailing after. But here he is, books shoved to one side so he can rest his head in his arms.

Cas is half-tempted to poke him to check he’s still alive.

“Is he okay?” Eileen asks, cornering Cas before he even gets into the kitchen properly.

“Dean told me he was a ‘cheap date’, whatever that means.”

“It means it only takes a few drinks to get him very drunk.” Eileen pauses. “What did you think it meant?”

“I was _hoping_ that. I think everything Dean says is innuendo.”

He thought he was leaving a good opening for Eileen to ask him how his day off was, but instead of waiting to see if he has anything else to say or even needling him to give up something about Dean that would be fun to tease him for, she looks over at Sam, frowning. “I’ll have to teach him how to drink, or I don’t deserve to be Irish,” she declares. “Get Dean to take him to the bar again and then you go with him and take me.”

“You’ve been planning this.”

“And you wouldn’t? You invited Dean to live with you after one day.” She rolls her eyes emphatically. “Did he order anything?”

“No, but since we don’t have any other customers, I bet if you ran to the shop and got him some painkillers he’d never forget it.”

She shakes her head, but then when Cas goes back out to stand behind the counter, he’s barely taken stock of what tasks need doing next when Eileen comes past, apron off and purse on her shoulder. She pauses to wave at Cas rather sarcastically before she goes out the door.

“See you tomorrow,” she teases through the windows as she heads towards the shop.

Sam pays no attention to any of these events.

Cas wonders if he should try and get a head start on his new rivalry for information before Dean makes any urgent move to prove Cas wrong. Even some small gesture to try and draw a proper peace treaty between himself and Sam would go a long way, but Cas can’t think of what small things to do.

He probably would have looked desperate if he’d made the run to the store instead.

It might not be entirely fair in his challenge with Dean to encourage Sam and Eileen to get to know each other just because one of them is deep in his confidence and is going to be far easier for both Sam and Cas to talk to.

Cas turns his attention to the coffee machine, lifting the lid up to look at all the parts he never really thought about before. There must be something to adjust to un-sludge the coffee.

He’s still uncertainly examining it when the trickle of usual morning customers begin arriving, and he has to drop everything and serve and cook and do two people’s work. Eileen comes back as he’s lining up orders on the hotplate, looking over his shoulder to see if he should panic or not at the sound of the door. She can see he’s rushed off his feet, and she still dawdles over to Sam to nudge him awake and hand him painkillers and a glass of water from the urn by the door. She smiles and winds her ponytail around her hand as he thanks her in sign language. Cas has no idea if he knew that already, studied it for her, or picked it up from hanging around the diner. It makes her extremely happy when she returns to the kitchen, beaming as Cas hands her a pair of greasy tongs.

It’s late morning before he has a chance to turn the coffee machine off at the wall and start poking around, twisting valves experimentally, a little bit this way and the other, before he runs a test pot of coffee through it.

He’s holding up the jug to peer dubiously at the scene beyond the windows through the translucent watery brown liquid he produced, when Dean unexpectedly comes through the door from the other direction than home. He looks at Cas, staring at him through the coffee.

“You’re kidding, right?” he says, loud enough several patrons turn to look at him.

“I’m fixing the coffee maker.”

“Yeah, great job,” Dean says. Already, the patrons are losing interest, or at least, going back to listening intently while pretending not to look. How much of a usual scene have they become, Cas wonders. Even Sam had lifted his head at the sound of his brother’s voice, and is now getting back to work that he never started.

Cas glares stubbornly, but he knows what he’s inevitably going to say, so it’s really just trying not to look like a pushover, when it comes to Dean’s smiles. “I suppose you think you could do better.”

“C’mon, I got it working for a whole day.” He’s already changed course from heading to sit at the counter to coming around it. Cas steps back and lets him go look at the machine, leaning in to watch what Dean does with it. Dean turns to look at him and freezes when he realises how close they’re standing. Cas tracks his throat bobbing as he swallows nervously.

He’s probably not going to kiss Dean in front of everyone at the diner but the thought certainly crosses his mind.

A voice from across the room snaps them out of it - “Well, I don’t remember hirin’ _you_ , Dean.”

They both turn, startled, Dean nearly knocking the coffee pot flying so Cas has to grab it.

“You’re the same Benny who owns this joint?!”

“It is _good_ to see you again, brother.”

Dean shoves past Cas to get back out to the main diner floor, and in a moment Cas is watching, bemused, as his boss crushes Dean in a hug. When he lets Dean go, Dean takes a step back and sizes him up again in amazement. “When Cas told me how the diner got its name I never in a million years would have believed that all happened to you, but I imagined your face anyway because how many Bennys does a guy know?”

Benny laughs. “And here I am,” he drawls. “What are you –”

“How do you _know_ each other?” Cas interrupts, leaning across the counter to get their attention, feeling somewhat justifiably thrown and annoyed by this. It seems unfair anyone got to know Dean before he did, just on principle, but this is ridiculous.

Dean glances over at Benny again, looking suddenly more awkward. “We worked one crazy summer at Purgatory in Miami together.”

“Is that a bar?”

Dean rolls his eyes. “No, the afterlife.”

Cas frowns.

“Of course it was a bar.”

“’Course that was right before I met Andrea. I never kept in contact with anyone from my old life. Figured most wouldn’t want to see me again anyhows.”

“I would have.”

“You weren’t most, Dean.” They share a pause that looks mournful on Benny, but nervously sympathetic from Dean. Cas wonders how much more he knows about Benny than Cas does, which is… pretty much what he told Dean, to boil it down beside how kind Benny had been to him when he first arrived in town. “What about you? How can _you_ possibly be here with Castiel letting you stand behind the counter of my diner? I know for a fact he’d happily stab someone he _didn’t_ want back there and he’s mighty territorial.”

“I wouldn’t.”

Benny shakes his head, laughing to himself.

Cas supposes he probably would, if someone was really causing trouble. Definitely to defend the cash register or if they were going to attack himself or Eileen or – well, yes, he had more reasons to stab someone than not. In general. And plenty of sharp cooking implements to hand.

“It is a long, long story, but can I just say the other reason I would never have guessed this was _your_ diner is because the coffee is so absolutely friggin’ terrible?”

“Aw, come on, it’s not that bad.”

Cas _knows_ Dean is making him stupid when after all that bickering in defence of the coffee, and his job on his line, he just wordlessly holds up the coffee jug he’d been clutching for Benny to inspect the watery liquid inside. “We’ve been having some problems.”

Benny thankfully bursts out laughing again.

“So, uh, how about I buy you a drink and we catch up properly?” Dean offers. “You can bring Andrea along, and, uh, I’ll bring Cas.”

“Reckon we need to catch up,” Benny says, looking more thoughtfully between them all of a sudden. “Well, I have a lot of business in town, but you close up by eight and meet me at the bar.”

Cas nods, and Benny claps Dean on the shoulder and heads past him to go into the kitchen to talk properly to Eileen. Dean watches him for a moment more, eyebrows raised, then finally turns to Cas. “Well you could have warned me about _that_.”

“I actually couldn’t have, given I had no idea you knew each other.”

Dean waves logic away, sitting down at the counter. “Wow. Benny. Y’know, he did mention once he had a daughter – who I have to assume is the girl who took your day off – but all he said was she moved away up the west coast with her mom and they hadn’t seen each other for a decade, and then he got all moody and weird, so I didn’t wanna poke that with a ten foot pole.”

“He’s one of the happiest people I know.”

“Maybe there is some magic in this stupid town that actually helps –”

Cas looks up on instinct of who Dean is thinking of, and does a double take. Dean turns immediately to look at the empty table in the corner. “Aw, shit. Was he here today?”

“Perhaps he just took sick. He looked horrible.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “It’s never that easy. I should go find him.”

“Stay and fix the coffee machine.”

After a not particularly long look at the door, apparently weighing up leaving and having a difficult conversation with Sam over giving in to Cas’s obvious (hopefully understood to be friendly) attempt to sabotage his progress on actually communicating with his brother, Dean tips his head back to sigh in defeat.

“Well he doesn’t know I noticed he was gone right now, and maybe he’ll be in a better mood when I do catch up with him next. And you’re not actually going to serve customers that dirty water pretending to be coffee. I’ve got to get back home before we go to the bar, though.”

“I assume that’s not just to do your hair?”

“I went to the thrift store and I have bags of junk stashed by the door here.”

Cas checks he’s not blocking the door with a health and safety hazard (he isn’t, they’re under one of the tables, because Dean is annoyingly considerate when he’s not being plain annoying). He can actually feel his mood derailing from tense and nervous about everything Benny-related, to thinking only about Dean. Self-awareness doesn’t help. “What did you get?”

“Clothes, mostly. I’ve been living out of a single duffel for over a year and you have seen pretty much every worldly possession I have by now. Found some more books, some mugs because the whole ‘only enough plates and cups for one lonely guy’ thing is going to get old fast… You know, junk.” He shrugs, looking embarrassed.

Admitting to staying. It makes Cas’s heart swell.

“I have two mugs.”

“Yeah, and you stack dishes in the sink and then disappear out all day. I’m not buying them for me – I’m buying them so I don’t kill you.” He gets up and drags himself back around the counter again. This time Cas gives him the space – there are still customers and Benny is in the kitchen and clearly whatever they once shared, Dean could start smashing plates just because he felt like it and get forgiven for it by Benny, so accidentally murdering his ancient coffee machine on Cas’s watch is low on the list of worries.

Also, he’s uncertain about getting too close to Dean in front of Benny, revealing how distracted he is when Dean’s next to him.

He glances across the diner to Benny in the kitchen as he clears a table, then to Dean, wondering. He wishes he was better at picking up social nuance. He keeps a close eye as Benny leaves the kitchen, detours to clap Dean on the shoulder and reiterate how unbelievably great it is to see him again, and heads out of the diner to business elsewhere.

He can’t _see_ anything between them, for what that’s worth.

Dean leaves shortly after, and Cas watches him go, feeling guilty about giving him just a terse goodbye.

Something damp bounces off the back of his head – the washing up sponge. He turns to see Eileen looking at him with a raised eyebrow, and he sighs and drags himself into the kitchen.

“You’re doing the washing up for me?” Eileen asks, leaning on the counter as he approaches the sink.

“Is that not why you – Oh.”

“You’re looking at Benny like he ran over your cat.”

“I don’t have a cat.”

She rolls her eyes. “Cas. What’s wrong?”

Cas finds it easier to ask stupid questions silently. “Do you think he and Dean dated?”

She bites her lip critically as she signs, “Is Benny interested in men?”

“I have no idea.”

“He’s married now so what’s your problem?”

“I don’t know. Suddenly everything is complicated.”

“That’s what having a crush is like.”

“I moved here for things to be uncomplicated.”

“So did I.” She shrugs and smiles to herself, a gesture obviously meant as part of the conversation.

“How’s it going with Sam? Have you talked much?”

“He doesn’t give much away. I think he likes me but it’s hard to tell.”

“I haven’t seen him smile about anything except you since he got here, for what that’s worth.”

She frowns thoughtfully. “I don’t know...”

“Eileen, I know _nothing_ about dating and relationships and I can tell he cares about you, just as much as I could tell you cared about him.”

“Are you actually going to do the dishes or are we just standing here?” she asks, extremely pink now.

Cas smiles at her, fully sympathetic, and turns the hot water on full blast.

“And don’t use that sponge! It went on the floor!” she tells him over her shoulder as she moves across the kitchen to start her own chores.

Cas settles in for a considerably shorter shift, head still stuffed with questions he hopes that meeting for drinks will answer.


	15. Chapter 15

At around five Sam wanders back along the seafront road, seemingly aimless, but definitely keeping his face averted from the diner. Even with the light fading, Cas recognises him from a distance, because no one else in town is so tall and walks quite so despondently.

Business is slow, and Cas is determined to achieve _some_ small victory the same day he laid down the challenge.

He waves to Eileen once Sam has passed, hoping she hasn’t spotted him too - “Keep an eye out,” he gestures, and hurries out of the diner after Sam.

He’s stopped a little way along the road, leaning on the railing between them and the beach, apparently happy to watch the white tops of the waves in the darkness.

“Sam.”

He drops his head to his chest with a bitter laugh, defeated, before he turns and stands tall in front of Cas, squaring his shoulders. “What?”

“I’m just here to tell you some facts. What you do is your choice.”

Sam raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t say anything.

“Benny invited Dean and I to go to the bar at eight tonight. I know Eileen is planning on going too. It’s not going to be private or exclusive. I’ve been in the bar with him and everyone wants to talk to Benny. I’m just saying, if you’re in the room, there’s no reason you wouldn’t get invited to join us.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

There’s two layers of truth he has to dig through of his own and Dean’s motivations.

Think tactical, not emotional, he reminds himself.

“Because Eileen won’t ask you herself. And if Dean really does know Benny so well as it seems, I know Benny would consider you a friend of the family and want you there; you won’t seem like an intruder.”

Sam gives him a strange look, that Cas really can’t read on an unfamiliar face, but involves a lot of tense eyebrow movement. “You really didn’t know Dean and Benny knew each other?”

“No.”

Sam laughs to himself, turning away to look at the sea again. “Figures. Your face when he came into the diner this morning...”

“I should get back to work...”

“Yeah, of course. Um. Tell Eileen I’ll be there.”

“I will.” Cas turns to leave.

“Wait, Cas. Can I ask something? About Dean?”

Cas’s heart immediately starts pounding, whether because mentioning Dean does that to him, or he’s scared what Sam would want to know about their relationship. He knows how fake his voice sounds as he replies. “Uh, sure. Of course you can ask anything..”

“No, nothing like, uh... Just, you live with him now. And there’s something really messed up that he’s not telling me. He lied about where he was for the last two years before he was supposed to be studying, and I called the college he said he was going to because I was worried he dropped out just to move here for me, and the student office told me he dropped out nearly six months ago.”

“They’re _allowed_ to tell you that?” He can’t understand why Sam is suddenly trusting him, but it’s whiplash on the kid gloves he wore into the conversation thinking Sam would be hard to wring a ‘hello’ out of.

“Well, I told them I was with the FBI… Uh, don’t tell Dean this.”

Cas can’t help smiling to himself about how ridiculous these brothers are. He hasn’t got a clue where they learned to be so resourceful but Dean always seems to have a way to surprise Cas, and Sam doesn’t seem much different, and probably learned a lot of it from his brother. Still, that’s a long way to go for information he could just ask Dean about to his face, if they would only talk to each other instead of leaving Cas in the middle.

“I might have to reserve my answer to that depending on what you’re about to ask me.”

“Just… if he says anything about what happened, and it’s bad, I want to know. I feel like he’s been treating me like a child for years, not telling me any of the bad stuff that happens to him like I can’t handle it or shouldn’t know. And then something awful or crazy happens and I’m left in the lurch feeling responsible just that I didn’t get it out of him sooner. I mean, even if you just tell him that he should go talk to me… Push him not to keep it all to himself. I hate this whole situation. If he’s going to be here pestering me because he says he’s worried about _me_ , he shouldn’t bring all his baggage here and turn it into a drama about _him_.”

“Of course. There’s never enough room in the centre of attention.”

“C’mon, man, you don’t have to be sarcastic about it.”

“I thought you were worried about him.”

“I am. I’m sorry, I phrased that badly. I mean, how can I trust him to really be there for me like he said he wants to, if he’s actually having some huge meltdown of his own? You don’t know what it’s like in this family – I told you Thanksgiving is a horror show. This is the first time I’ve done anything for myself and put myself first, and he’s here, and something’s shady. You know how that makes me feel? Like my whole choice was pointless if I’m just going to be dealing with my big brother’s drama as an accessory to it.”

“For what it’s worth… He seems fine.”

Sam just huffs at that.

Cas glances over his shoulder at the diner. Eileen is out front, taking someone’s order, which he knows she hates and that she’ll give him crap for this – in front of Benny if he pushes his luck any further.

“Sam, I swear, as long as you are a customer at the diner, I’ll protect your right to work quietly and uninterrupted and do what I can to keep the drama away from you. And as long as Dean and I are… housemates… I’ll do my best to help him with his problems before they reach you.”

Sam looks so startled by Cas’s solemn declaration he can’t say anything. Cas glances at the diner to see another regular heading through the door, and leaves Sam to his thoughts without a look back.


	16. Chapter 16

Dean shows up around seven, wearing the nicest shirt Cas has ever seen him in, and with his hair stiff with product. He hangs around watching Cas frantically cleaning around still-eating customers and doing all the worst chores because Eileen is still making him pay for abandoning her to customer service. But when Cas snarks at Dean for having nothing better to do, Dean picks up the mop waiting by the counter, and gets to work.

“Don’t think I’m doing this for you. I owe Benny.”

“I don’t care why you’re doing it,” Eileen says. “Scrub faster.”

Looking properly alarmed, Dean swishes the mop back and forth like he’s being paid to do it.

Cas tells Eileen to go with a quarter of an hour to spare, aware she’s been scouring things in the kitchen for half an hour until she’s pink and her hair is damp at the front, and also he invited the man she’s crushing on to join them.

“So, it’s not just going to be a quiet catch up with Benny,” Dean says, when she’s gone. He sounds disappointed. Cas isn’t sure what the problem is when Dean knew there was going to be at least four of them to start with.

“I’ve been in the bar at the same time as him. The entire town is going to say hello to him one point or another. Text him under the table if you want a private conversation.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“And how does Eileen make it that much louder?”

“You know –”

Cas tips his head, wondering what on earth Dean’s problem is with her as he struggles for words. Sure she has no idea what volume is as a concept, but she’s pretty good at guessing how loud to talk based on context and it’s never been a problem before.

“– I thought it would just be, I don’t know, Benny and his wife, and –” He stops again, but this time looks less like he’s fishing for the right words and more like he just does not want to finish the sentence.

Cas has no idea what he means by it, so he just goes back into the kitchen, checks everything is off, hangs up his apron, and gestures Dean to leave while he turns off the lights.

Outside, Dean leans on the wall by the door as Cas locks up. “So, uh. What _is_ Andrea like? You said she was rich, and I’ve spent all afternoon trying to figure out how the hell earthy man-of-the-people Benny ends up marrying some rich chick with a yacht.”

“You’ll meet her yourself in a minute.”

“Yeah, but what should I expect? Does she look down on mere mortals, impossibly hot and probably a spy using this bay as a strategic landing point? Or is she like… I don’t know, a female Benny, beard, hat and all, and the fancy boat and money doesn’t even come into it?”

“She looks and acts fairly normal to me.”

“Cas, no offence, but I haven’t got a clue what your idea of normal is.”

“I don’t know. She’s rich, Greek, and always brings me the financial section of the newspaper and demands to know my opinion on stock.”

“That’s not normal.”

He punctuates this by putting his arm around Cas’s shoulders and pulling him closer, and Cas is still trying to work out if Dean is being affectionate or strange when they reach the bar, where Benny is waiting outside with his arm around Andrea.

“I can hardly believe you’re actually here, Dean,” he says, immediately going for another hug. Cas lets Andrea air-kiss his cheeks, but doesn’t get a chance to ask her how the boat is doing before Benny drags her away to proudly present to Dean. He shakes her hand while managing not to convey that he thinks she’s weird, at least, though he seems stunned at everything, including several more glances at Benny to check that he is still who he seems to be, and that Andrea really is his wife.

“Is Eileen not with you?” Andrea asks. “Benny said she would be here.”

“She had to stop at her place and get changed,” Cas half-lies.

“Well, let’s go inside,” Benny says, putting his arm around Andrea again and rubbing her shoulder. She leans gratefully against him – she looks cold without a jacket and she’s clearly the one leading him inside. Cas feels Dean’s hand brush his own shoulder again as they follow them in.

It’s weirder when they sit. The bar’s tables have more bench seating, less comfortable than the diner but with space for a party. Benny ushers Andrea to sit then slides in next to her with his arm around her waist. Dean prods Cas to sit and crowds him up against the wall, draping his arm over his shoulder again. Cas has no idea what to do – Andrea is happily leaning into Benny while she waits for the warmth of the bar to seep in, but Cas ends up sitting too straight, hands folded uncomfortably on the table.

Jamie comes over to them immediately, asking how they’re doing and chatting as she takes their drink orders, aiming the full beam of her smile at Benny.

When she heads back to the bar, Dean turns to Benny. “What in the world did you do to this town to make them all love you so much? Is there a protection racket thing you have going on and this is all fear? Because Cas has been terrible at enforcing it on us new arrivals.”

Benny laughs. “I just got to know the people here. They were good to me when I needed it, and I just try to pay that back.”

“So what’s the story? What have you been up to since Purgatory?”

“Elizabeth’s mother died when she was nineteen, not long after we parted ways. I came here to help, and I guess the town kept a bit of my soul. I could never convince her to leave because in my heart, I didn’t really want to either. And then I met Andrea the self-same day I was opening up the diner I’d just poured all my savings into, and I stopped pretending I was just trying to give Elizabeth a future here, and admitted I wanted one too.”

“Before Benny there was nothing in this town except the bar and the fishing boats,” Andrea says proudly.

Cas glances at Dean, who does a brilliant job of pretending that he hasn’t spent the last week complaining endlessly about everything the town doesn’t have. “Getting a happily ever after couldn’t have happened to a better guy… So what do _you_ get out of this, Andrea?”

She turns dolorous eyes on Dean and says quietly, “Protection from his racketeering, of course.” She lets him sweat for a moment before she bursts out laughing, so loudly it halts conversation in the rest of the bar for a moment, slapping Benny’s arm.

“She has _far too_ intricate and well-thought-out plans for how to turn a life on a luxury yacht into one of piracy on the high seas,” Cas tells Dean. “Don’t let her convince you to run away with them. I’m always worried they’re about to recruit a crew.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t let them take me away to sea,” Dean says, clinging harder to Cas for a moment.

“So what about you, Dean? Why are you here?” Benny’s curiosity is evident.

Cas feels Dean tense up, his fingers digging just a bit more hard into Cas’s arm. His voice sounds relaxed, though. “I’m visiting my brother.”

“Your brother, Sam?”

“That’s the only one I have.”

“What is he doing here? You said he ran off to be a lawyer.”

“Well apparently he finally worked out that was as stupid as I always told him it was. He’s writing a novel now, sitting around in your diner.”

“My diner,” Andrea says.

“Your diner.” Dean grins at her – that easy way he has which makes Cas think he’s just made a new friend for life.

“What’s his novel about?” Andrea asks.

“Probably a lawyer from New York who gets fed up with his job and runs off to live by the sea,” Dean says.

“You don’t know then?”

“He’s not been exactly forthcoming. Cas thinks he’s writing a horror novel.”

“Or he’s studying the occult at the diner just for fun,” Cas says.

Benny doesn’t look impressed – “I don’t think our insurance covers that.”

Andrea laughs at that, and she and Benny turn to smile at each other. Cas feels Dean nudge him, giving him an approximation of his fond smile when Cas glances at him. It unsettles him, but he doesn’t have time to think about why as Jamie returns with a tray of drinks – Andrea insisted on rum, Dean hadn’t argued, and Cas went with what they said. Benny hadn’t specified but Jamie puts a tall glass of cranberry juice in front of him, and then leaves the tray, crowded with shot glasses around the gaps where their main drinks had been.

“You’re still sober, then,” Dean says, eyeing the extra shots. “This isn’t too...”

Benny shakes his head, good-natured about what seemed like an over share to Cas, who has never asked about why Benny didn’t drink, and now feels trapped at the table with three people who clearly know more than enough. “I worked in bars long enough this is no problem.”

“This is shore leave,” Andrea says, taking a sip of her rum and savouring it. “I don’t mind the dry boat, but it’s nice to have someone to drink with from time to time.”

Benny, who has his eyes on the door, suddenly smiles much more genuinely. “Eileen’s here. And she has a date!”

Dean turns too quickly, pre-scowling even before his eyes focus on Sam walking in beside her. Dean looks back to Cas; Cas thinks he seems suspicious and takes a gulp of his drink, hoping this stays as a plausible scenario that she bumped into Sam and invited him along.

“That’s Sam,” Dean says.

Benny gets up at once. “Well, it is a pleasure to meet you at long last, Sam.”

Sam stares at him, nonplussed, then cautiously takes Benny’s offered hand. “I’m sorry, Dean’s never mentioned you.”

“Cold,” Andrea says, smiling at Dean, no offence meant.

“Hey, if I ever mentioned ‘I had a friend once who could...’ in a story, odds are it was him.”

“Come on, sit down,” Benny says, ushering Eileen towards the extra chair he’d pulled over for her; Sam has to get one of his own to join them, awkwardly fitting his knees under the table.

Benny settles back in beside Andrea, putting his hand on her leg. Cas _knows_ he’s not imagining it any more when a moment later Cas sees Dean’s arm disappear under the table, and a moment later his hand is on Cas’s knee, squeezing gently. Cas shifts and glances at Dean, but Dean’s asking Sam how the novel’s going with the kind of snarky brotherly teasing that is completely at odds with his hand. Sam shrugs a uncommitted answer and Cas takes two of the shots from the tray and downs them.

One of the more mysterious born-and-raised locals, from whom Cas has never got more than a name and a daily “heya” in a way that makes Cas think she hates him, comes over to talk to Benny. He has apparently been helping Billie with something or other to do with her work, which Cas also knows nothing about. She scares him more than anyone else in town. He doesn’t get a chance to ask, because Andrea gets his attention as they’re the last two people at the table not engaged in another conversation, and produces a newspaper from her bag, folded open at the financial section.

Dean’s hand is still on his knee. Cas feels a sort of tingly lightheadedness about it that’s more than just drinking too fast.

Conversation drifts around the table back and forth – Eileen is distracted talking personally to Sam, seeming to take a snarky comment of Dean’s about how creepy it is to live on the edge of the woods, and turn it into a long conversation about how much they both happen like walking in the wilderness. Cas feels Dean sitting on the edge of that, a pained but supportive smile on his face and his grip on Cas’s knee somewhat desperate.

Cas tries to change the subject with Andrea to something Dean would find less boring, only for it to turn out that Dean somehow knows a lot about Greek islands, or at least the monsters and myths that belong to them, and Cas finds himself the one stuck on the edge of a conversation, pinned frozen by Dean’s hand, taking too many drinks of rum as a distraction, as Dean turns on world class charm and a sort of social chameleon power that after ten minutes of discussing boating around the Mediterranean has netted himself an open invitation to go on a vacation with Andrea and Benny to tour the islands some time. He politely declines, and Benny, having been distracted talking to Sheriff Hanscum (who’d seamlessly replaced his previous conversation), drops back into the conversation as she leaves, to remind Andrea that Dean hates flying and would never go unless they sailed all the way there.

“Well, you’re always welcome to come with us on the yacht. Where we go… Who knows.” She shrugs, grinning wickedly.

“Don’t listen to her,” Cas says, wondering if they have noticed how Dean’s arm is obviously stretched over to Cas’s side of the bench. Sweat is prickling the back of his neck. “Remember, I’m not letting you be taken away to sea.”

“Aw, come now, you’re invited too,” Benny says. “Why don’t we all have a weekend on the boat when the weather’s a little better: you, Dean, Eileen… Sam if he likes.”

“What?” Sam asks, abruptly turning at the sound of his name.

“We’re being invited to a party on a yacht,” Dean tells him, grinning. “Told ya this place wasn’t all bad.”

“You were the one who spent at least an hour last night complaining about how awful the town was, not me,” Sam reminds him, scowling. “You said it was like the setting for a horror movie.”

Dean glances guiltily at Cas. “It’s not all bad,” he says. “And I had no idea Benny was here at that time either.”

“You’ll love it here before you know it,” Benny tells Dean firmly, like there’s nothing he believes more in all the world, and he turns to smile at Andrea again, sliding closer on the bench to kiss her cheek.

Dean’s hand slides a little way up from Cas’s knee to thigh, and he squeezes possessively. Cas feels suddenly too hot, too anxious.

Cas leans in towards his ear. “Dean, can we talk privately?”

Dean jumps a little, and withdraws his hand at last. “Um. Sure.” He gets up, forcing Sam to move out of the way, with a great amount of fuss of moving his chair back. Cas grabs a third shot and downs it before following; Dean hovers uselessly just beyond the table, and Cas grabs him and drags him to the back of the room.

“What are you doing?”

“Uh – what?”

“Your hand on my leg.”

Dean looks panicked, glancing back at the table. Cas follows his gaze and catches Eileen looking quickly away. Dean takes his arm and pulls him into the men’s room.

“Cas, uh, I thought we...” Dean closes his eyes and rather over-dramatically crosses the room to lean on the sink and look in the mirror. “I forgot you don’t...”

Cas follows him, to stand right beside him again. He pushes Dean’s shoulder to make him turn and look at him, rougher than he meant, but he’s livid. “That has nothing to do with it. What happened is that you said you didn’t want to pursue a relationship at this time, and then began acting extremely over-familiarly to me in a way that made me extremely uncomfortable.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I was being stupid.” He looks anguished. Cas feels like he’s never been able to read anyone as clearly as Dean. It again kicks the fight out of him, as Dean holds his gaze. “I’m sorry.”

“Why were you behaving like this? I wouldn’t have minded, if you told me beforehand.”

Dean blinks at him for several seconds. “Wha – seriously? Um, no, never mind that. God, I’m being such an idiot. It’s just… Me and Benny, we were in exactly the same place, that summer. We were both a mess, you know? And years later I meet him out of the blue, and he’s got a hot wife, a yacht, seems to own half the town, and he’s totally at peace? I have a car, a few bags of cheap or broken possessions and...”

“Me.”

“No, um, not like – it’s just… We got kinda close right off the bat and I figured maybe if it looked like we had… He and Andrea are just so _good_ together, and I… You must think I’m such a loser. And a creep.”

“Did you not already mock me several times for having an empty house with three pieces of furniture in it as if you were trusting your life to a serial killer? We’re square.”

Dean blushes and looks away.

“And, Dean, I was serious. If you just talk to me about what you want, I’m fine with you doing just about anything. You just upset me because I didn’t understand what you were doing, and it made me uncomfortable because we’d discussed nothing about a potential physical relationship. I understand now… And I’m happy to play along.”

It sounds thrilling to Cas – a chance to see what it’s like to leap straight into dating Dean without any of the high stakes and expectations of actually doing it. Dean’s confession from the night before makes Cas sure Dean has more than enough feelings that he’d ask Cas to date him if he didn’t want space after all. Or, despite his jealousy-fuelled wandering hands, at least have some healthy consideration for Cas now he’d been shaken back to his right mind, and if anything would hopefully be far more aware of over-stepping those lines, because he had looked so genuinely mortified.

“Um. Thanks. I mean, you really don’t have to, I really was being a creep and not in a fun way like joking about your interior design. _I’d_ have decked me in the same situation, now I think about it...”

“Well I’m not you. Which, uh, presents the problem that I have no idea how to act in this situation. If you really desire to pretend to have a more… traditional relationship with me.”

“You get more formal the more worried you get. Or drunk. I can’t tell.”

“I apologise –”

“No, it’s, uh. Endearing. Look, just follow my lead, lean a bit closer to me… Laugh at all my jokes like you think I’m funny. Steal sips of my drink. And, uh, just a practical concern about if we were really, you know, full on honeymoon period _together_ … we should look like we made the most of this time.”

“What time?”

“Blatantly obvious sneaking off to the bathroom together time?” Dean steps forward until they’re almost breathing the same air. He raises his hands as if about to touch Cas, but he stops. Cas nods, not sure what he’s about to let Dean do, but absolutely desperate to find out.

Dean pulls on Cas’s tie to loosen it, then undoes the first few buttons on his shirt. Cas stands there, arms at his side, dazed and feeling that same heat rush through him as Dean carefully reaches up and musses his hair, running his fingers back and forth through it. They’re nose to nose and Dean’s eyes are dark, his lips parted, damp from running his tongue over them, and Cas feels like he’s unwillingly memorising the freckles dusted across Dean’s face, can feel his brain assigning all the spare room to this one stupid moment as Dean’s fingers skim down his side, and tickle at his waist as he gently untucks one side of Cas’s shirt. His fingertips slip under the fabric and rest on his bare hip, and Dean freezes there; Cas takes a moment to realise that Dean isn’t doing anything to make him look more rumpled, that he’d just wanted to touch Cas and given in to an impulse without thinking.

Cas knows what this dizzy hot feeling is now, though he barely recognises it from the dull ache he’s grown bored of years ago he’d once _thought_ was all this was.

He reaches up, feeling his arm jerk robotically as he raises it, but it’s simple as easy as a dream to press his fingers to Dean’s lips and feel how soft they are for himself; how they part and Dean lets him slip his fingertips past his teeth and feels Dean’s tongue meet them, hot and wet.

He’s never been this turned on in his life. He’s barely even hard but just the feeling of _wanting_ Dean in a way he’s never known before has him reeling with what this might be. That there’s so much more to intimacy than just standing in front of each other barely touching, and he craves it.

He pulls his hand away and watches a thread of saliva break and fall on Dean’s chin, and he _knows_ the next thing he has to do is lean forward and taste Dean’s lips for himself, like anything else would –

Dean steps back suddenly as Cas leans in, causing him to stumble. Dean catches him by the shoulders and props him back upright, before taking another step back. He looks stunned.

“I, uh. That’s.” He clears his throat, and looks Cas up and down, and all Cas wants to do is step forward and take Dean by the front of the shirt and haul him in for that kiss, and live with the hypocrisy of starting this whole thing because he’d been uncomfortable about Dean touching him.

No, Dean doesn’t look stunned – he looks like he is fighting back tears.

That sobers Cas up a little but by the time he’s forced himself to look concerned and try and think outside his own electrically buzzing, overheated body, Dean’s forced the look away completely, and he’s grinning at Cas.

“I don’t think anyone’s ever turned you down before, have they?”

“I never –”

“I meant it, Cas. This all got way too real way too fast from all the friendly flirting and now I _like_ you I’m not fucking everything up this time, and I’m going to need like, a _month_ of keeping you all to myself if we – we’d not get out of bed that whole time, you know?” He somehow blends wistfulness and crudeness as if it’s an art form. Cas can still hear the pain in his voice and he thinks it has to be about more than not sleeping with him, or else they’d not be standing apart, awkwardly having this conversation.

“No, I don’t know.”

Dean smirks. “No, you don’t. But you look like you are starting to get the idea.” He takes a deep breath, and steps a little bit further away, looking in the mirror to mash his own hair under his hand. “Teasing you is going to make the wait so much easier. For me.”

Cas is still trying to remember how to breathe.

Dean holds out his hand to him. “Come on, you ready to go pretend we’ve already christened every flat surface in your house and my car and now we’re saving up for our own yacht off your diner wage?”

Cas feels another jolt of heat rush through him.

“Just to be clear, while you’re busy pretending… all that… This is entirely because _you_ don’t want to move it further than that, and my own… lack of alignment… has absolutely nothing to do with it?”

“You could be some oversexed beach hunk in a speedo – not that this shitty town’s ecosystem supports them – and I’d be telling you to slow down while I get my head together.”

“There is a whole list of people from my non-existent dating history I wish I could send that signed confession to just to see their faces.” He takes Dean’s offered hand, and lets himself be led out of the bathroom.


	17. Chapter 17

Sam and Eileen are standing up, ready to leave.

“Hey, the party’s barely started. Where are you going?” Dean asks; Cas finds one of the most reliable ways to tell how he’s feeling is how he touches him, and the grip on Cas’s hand is the same as it was all the way back across the bar, no tighter. He’s just pretending to be upset.

“We were going to go for a walk and get some fresh air. It’s too close in here, and Eileen was feeling dizzy.”

Cas looks at Eileen, his concern stopping dead at her narrowed eyes asking him not to question it. “I hope you have a refreshing walk, then,” Cas tells them.

Dean slaps Sam on the arm and gives him the least subtle wink ever, and Sam hurries Eileen away before he can say anything too embarrassing. Dean just watches them leave, beaming. “Well, if _that_ all works out for them, reckon we can cut the time it takes to cheer Sammy up in half, at least.” He leans closer to murmur to Cas’s ears only, “Which bodes well for us.”

“Don’t be crude about it.”

“I’m just saying.”

“A new relationship doesn’t fix underlying issues, even if it makes them easier to bear.”

Dean rolls his eyes and steps away, nudging Cas to sit back down. Benny and Andrea are talking to each other just as closely as they had been, and Andrea leans away, laughing, watching closely as Dean sits next to Cas and pulls him close, arm over his shoulders and hand stroking his neck.

“We were just saying how your brother seems nice. We’re very protective of Eileen, you understand.”

“Are you giving me the ‘if you hurt her I’ll kill you’ speech to pass on to Sam or what?”

“Just checking we don’t have to give it to anyone to start with,” Benny reassures Dean. “Seeing as we’re out to sea more often than not, we can’t keep an eye.”

“I swear, he’s a bit troubled sometimes, but he’s the nicest kid ever, especially to his girlfriends. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

Benny nods like he takes Dean’s word on absolute faith.

“So, wait a minute,” Dean says, “You have this whole protective thing about Eileen and you aren’t going to give me the same speech about hurting Cas? Talk about workplace discrimination.” He grins at Cas, giving him a friendly squeeze.

“Actually, I’d be more worried I’d have to tell him to be careful about ruffling a hair on your sensitive little head,” Benny chuckles. “So come on now, we’ve finally got the time to talk and you can’t avoid it forever. How did you and Castiel end up together?”

Cas feels Dean tense up again, and feels he has to ease the mood, so he goes for an easy, truthful start that should cause more than enough distraction to keep from talking deep feelings they hadn’t discussed:

“He walked into the diner and insulted it.”

“No, I walked into the diner and _you_ insulted _me_.” Dean immediately cheers up for familiar teasing.

“You very clearly started it.”

“I was being friendly.”

“You were being an ass.”

Dean looks pleadingly to Benny. “Okay, I’m hurt, you can kill him for me now.”

“Is this how it was when you first talked to each other?” Andrea asks.

“Pretty much,” Cas says.

“I can see how it all happened, then,” she says, leaning back and nodding wisely.

Dean rolls his eyes. “Hey, I promised I’d buy you all a drink in exchange for this catch up, and you’ve bought two rounds already.”

“It’s okay, this evening’s on me,” Andrea says.

“No, I owe at least the next round. Lemme get it.” He gets up before she can argue, and heads over to the bar.

Benny shakes his head. “He has not changed a bit. Just as hard as ever to get anything out of him.”

Cas glances over to Dean at the bar, chatting with Jamie. “Thinking of that. Do you know a Marv?”

“Personally? Can’t say that I do.”

“Even just someone Dean mentioned in passing.”

Benny thinks for a moment, but just shakes his head again. “I’m sorry, friend. I’ll let you know if I remember, but Dean was always careful about his past. He might have met him since I knew him first. It was an awful long time ago now. Plenty of time for him to meet new people and me to forget.”

“Perhaps.”

“So what’s the problem with this Marv? An old flame of Dean’s haunting you?”

“Hardly. He’s been giving me an unreasonable amount of trouble and I’ve never even heard of him except in a thoughtless mention each from Sam and Dean. I would love to find him and ask him some questions about a misunderstanding they have.”

“And you can’t ask them?”

“I thought you knew Dean.”

Benny laughs hard at that. “You’re right, my friend. Well I wish you the best of luck untangling this one.”

Dean returns with drinks, and with them comes easier conversation, drifting back to the sort of news about their lives that’s easier to share, but Cas can barely hold onto, with another round of shots and Dean nuzzling up to him as they talk. He thinks back to that moment in the bathroom, just before Dean pulled away, when it seemed like some sort of divine revelation had struck him. He may have been pointedly un-religious, but there seemed to be some new meaning in the world, some sort of truth he’d been missing all his life until he’d looked at Dean and _wanted_ him.

He didn’t think it was about sex, per say, although it was terrifying and wonderful that this was even a part of it, but that Dean meant something to him in a way he’d never wanted to let someone in before. Something about him made him feel protective, in a ridiculous primal brain way he thought was a feeling douchebags made up to be cruel to women. If Dean truly asked for the space because of his own issues and Cas was merely conveniently safe and Dean assumed Cas wouldn’t hit on him or pressure him for sex… It meant Dean trusted him – trusted him not to overstep all these walls and artificial distances and delays he put between them for his own protection, which for all Dean’s talk handed Cas all the control on a platter, with the knowledge Dean would let Cas do whatever he wanted and was trusting him not to hurt him by ignoring his fear. It was sort of ironic realising that Dean trusted Cas not to want to have sex with him, made Cas feel that same hot, skin-too-tight feeling as he thought about it, but he’d lost count of shots and Andrea had just ordered a round of shot glasses full of something he recognised as a night-ending sickly yellow liqueur that tasted of –


	18. Chapter 18

Lemon, sticking to his tongue, fuzzing up his teeth, coating the back of his throat.

He hates that drink. He’s too hot, sticky with sweat and uncomfortable, and his alarm is blaring and hurting his head. He scrunches his eyes up and goes back to sleep from sheer force of will.

Cas bolts awake, a while later.

He’s still damp with sweat, but this time the too-hot feeling is a bit more obvious. He’s using Dean’s bare chest as a pillow.

“Morning, sunshine,” Dean murmurs, his voice more gravelly than normal, the same horrible sickly smell of artificial lemon on his breath.

Cas forces himself to sit up, and stares at Dean lying stretched comfortably out with his head under an arm. He smiles at Cas. “You look like hammered crap.”

“Ugh.” Cas turns to squint at his clock – it has to be wrong. Like it stopped last night or something. It seems to think it’s ten o’clock already. He scrambles out of bed.

“Wow, easy there!”

“I’m three hours late for work,” Cas groans, stumbling over his trousers from yesterday. He pulls them on without bothering to look for boxers, and, since it’s there, grabs the shirt lying on top of them too. No, it’s red, and he never – he’s too panicked to care, and starts buttoning up the shirt rather than ask how it got there.

“It’s okay, you have basically the best boss in the history of the universe,” Dean says, yawning hugely. “And he’s the one who was laughing his ass off as you got absolutely hammered last night at his wife’s expense, so I think he’ll understand.”

“I’m _never_ late,” Cas counters.

Dean grumbles to himself inaudibly, and throws back the covers, getting up as well. “Okay, just… Calm down, I’ll come down to the diner with you and –”

“Why are _you_ naked?” Cas’s panic about work ends abruptly at the sight, slamming immediately into fear that he’d utterly shattered Dean’s trust. Another wave of sweat courses over him like he’s still pressed up against Dean under the covers, slowly broiling in their body heat.

“Because someone has an _insane_ rule about clothes in the bed. You’d think I’d brought a cheeseburger to bed, the way you went off at me.”

Cas blinks at him. “I don’t remember.”

“I’m surprised you remember anything, to be honest. You drank twice what I did.”

Cas remembers shots. Lots and lots of shots.

 “I need to go brush my teeth.”

As he stomps out the room he hears Dean weakly protesting, “That’s my shirt...”

He barely makes it out the room before his stomach lurches, and he has to run to the bathroom. He dry-heaves over the toilet but manages to hold himself together, and when the wave of nausea passes, he hauls himself up and goes about his morning routine shaky and looking pale and clammy in the mirror even after he washes his face.

He meets Dean in the hall, where he’s pulling on one of Cas’s shirts. Even wearing jeans now is not enough to stop Cas’s eyes running right down and back up, with a vivid mental picture of how he fills the crotch area of the jeans. It’s karma, he thinks. He was never meant to feel this way until he made Dean’s life hell with the casual nudity and now he’s being forced to relive it himself.

“We have _got_ to talk about how all your clothes are still in a fucking suitcase when you’ve been here apparently for years, but I gotta piss more badly, and you had better not fucking run off to work while I’m in the bathroom,” Dean says, shoving past him.

“Good morning to you too,” Cas says at the bathroom door slamming in his face. He wanders down the hall to wait by the door, checking the time on his phone. It’s on one percent battery, and promptly dies on him, like it had been waiting for that last brief moment of usefulness. It’s only ten past ten, but the anxiety of each second passing hammers in Cas’s throat, along with the burning feeling of nausea.

Dean reappears as Cas returns from plugging his phone in, hair somehow miraculously neat as ever, looking completely fine, and he waits expectantly for Cas to open the door, like he hadn’t demanded the hold up in the first place.

He takes Cas’s hand as they set off down the street together. Cas glances at him sidelong a few times, until they’re most of the way down the hill.

“Did – did we… perform intercourse?”

Dean chokes. “What? No! Where the hell did you get that idea?”

Because he genuinely didn’t trust his drunk self to respect Dean’s boundaries any more the moment he realised Dean had trusted him with them; like as soon as he was handed anything precious he had a tendency to drop it on the floor just to watch it smash. “We were naked in bed together.”

Dean glances around, clearly aware they’d reached the part of town that might have passers-by to overhear.

 “I told you – you’re so freakin’ weird about clothes. I tried to just wear boxers, and you gave this huge, incoherent speech about how uncomfortable and unhealthy it was, until I threw them in your face to shut you up. Then you snuggled up to me and fell right asleep and drunk-snored half the night. If you were going to make a move on me you were far too wasted. Anyway… you’d remember if we’d hooked up.” He grins at Cas in a leering sort of way, but Cas feels too sick and dizzy to roll his eyes. Dean doesn’t seem to be lying, none of the tells Cas has picked up so far showing, but he feels a vague dread that Dean is still not telling him everything from the night before.

Dean’s already moved on to think about other things – “Huh, Sam’s not at the diner. Still, might be a time to end this conversation.”

Cas stops before the door, forcing Dean to halt too. “Thank you.”

“What, for not walking into your place of work talking loudly about all the getting nasty we _didn’t_ do?”

“Just… in general. The last thing I remember from last night is being so thankful you’re you.”

“Cas you’re still more than half-drunk, shut up and go put that sexy shapeless apron on.” Dean pushes Cas through the door, where the first thing he sees is Benny standing in his place, ‘sexy shapeless apron’ on, grinning at him.

“Good morning there, hot wings.”

“Oh no,” Cas says faintly. He has no idea what Benny’s calling him that for but it can’t be good, and also he has a sudden feeling that he and his stomach agree they’re never eating bar food again. “I’m so sorry you had to step in for me because I slept through my alarm.”

“Step in for you? I gave you the day off about the time Andrea whispered to me you weren’t getting out of the bar alive.”

“Well, congratulations, tell her I feel dead.”

Dean puts his hands on Cas’s shoulders. “Go sit down and let Benny make you the greasiest breakfast you’ve had in your life, sweetheart.”

Cas is so dazed at the name he does exactly as Dean says, drifting over to a nearby empty table, while Dean stays leaning at the counter, laughing with Benny.

He completely forgot to investigate if they were a past item, but it suddenly doesn’t matter. Dean looks comfortable and happy chatting to Benny, but the weirder thing is Benny does too, like there’s a sort of peace he has that even with all his happiness about the diner and Andrea, was still missing until Dean was there.

Considering Benny gave Cas a job and his entire second chance along with it, Cas feels a weird sort of obligation to keep Dean in the town at whatever cost for Benny’s sake more than his own.

And since Dean called him ‘sweetheart’ that’s a fairly big ‘own sake’ he’s considering.

He slumps down further on the seat, and tries not to look too obvious turning to sniff his collar. It smells of Dean, or at least the overwhelming smell of his hair product and bodyspray in a unique combination that Cas had been huffing most of the previous night while Dean had been wrapped around him at the bar, long enough to associate it with Dean and being confusingly attracted to him. He hadn’t really figured what that all really entailed, but being crazy enough to spend five minutes just inhaling a shirt was a start to understanding the stuff a large percentage of the rest of the population dealt with all the time.

How had the world not come crashing to a halt, Cas has no idea. He could have spent the rest of the day curled over a table, pleasantly sleepy and vaguely turned on, and only ceases this weird activity because the real Dean sits next to him and lets Cas sleepily roll from the table to his shoulder. He smells like Cas’s laundry powder and sweat and that sickly lemon smell Cas used to hate a few seconds ago, but now he finds it almost alluring.

“Is Eileen working today?” he asks the patch of skin under Dean’s ear, face so close his lips brush it as he talks.

“Yeah,” Dean says, shivering and sliding his hand between them to gently move Cas away. “She waved at me but I don’t think she was saying anything.” His fingers slip into Cas’s hair and begin stroking it, and it’s not a bad trade, so he tips his head back, eyes closed, and enjoys the much-needed head massage.

“Waving is still saying something,” he murmurs.

“I’m gonna have to learn sign language, aren’t I?”

“She can lip read. Uncomfortably well from across a room.”

“Yeah but I figure I could really make her cry when they ask me to officiate their wedding for them and I do it all in sign.”

“You heartless monster.”

“Also if I learn it faster than Sam he’ll hate me.”

“You’re really selling your character to me today.”

“And you’re always gossiping with her from across the diner. I want in. You’re probably always talking about me.”

“We really don’t.”

Cas finally opens his eyes and leans forward out of Dean’s touch to look across the diner. Eileen waves at him because she had already been leaning on the window ledge watching them. Cas forces his heavy limbs to move to say, “Dean thinks I snore too loudly.”

Eileen bursts out laughing, and signs back, “Sam and I drank wine and talked about poetry and then made out until midnight, but he sent me home before I turned back into a pumpkin.”

“It was the first date.”

“I wouldn’t have minded breaking the rules!” She pauses to check something cooking behind her, then just before Cas looks away, turns and says, “Has Dean even taken you out?”

Cas returns his gaze to Dean, who is giving him a very unimpressed look at the lengthy interlude. “She says you’re not treating me right and you have to take me on a date.”

“I’m buying you breakfast, what more do you want?” He turns and glares at Eileen, and gestures the “I’m looking at you” universal motion.

She raises an eyebrow and laughs at him, then goes back to cooking.

Cas is actually looking at the table for the first time, and to his amazement, two cups of coffee have appeared on it some time since he thumped his head down on it with the intention to die there. The coffee looks as black as night and smells perfect. He picks up his and huffs in the steam with a groan before he reports back to Dean. “If it makes you feel better, she and Sam only kissed last night.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better at all. He’s supposed to hook up with her and be happy again.”

“I told you, it doesn’t work like that.”

“Works for me, usually. Used to fix every bad day, going out to pick someone up.” He sighs. “Obviously, I don’t do that any more.”

“You told me you would have picked Jamie up, just a couple of weeks ago.”

“Well, yeah, but that was before ‘any more’.”

“Oh.” Cas picks up a sugar packet, fiddles with it for a moment, and accidentally tears it open.

Benny picks that moment to come over with two plates of food. He raises his eyebrows. “Well I’m not cleaning that up.”

“Sorry.”

He puts down a plate in front of Dean that’s piled high with bacon and potato, and swimming in grease. “I’ll rope off this table as a biohazard until your next shift.”

Cas narrows his eyes, wondering.

Benny chuckles at him, and leans over to swipe the table with the cloth from his apron pocket, before he places Cas’s plate in front of him. “You’re still not great at the subtleties, are you?”

“It’s an uphill struggle,” Dean says, and leans over and pecks Cas’s cheek.

Cas is stunned into eating the entire pile of food in front of him while he tries to work out how much Dean was putting on just because of Benny, and how much was because he wanted to do it.


	19. Chapter 19

“What are you going to do with your day off?” Dean asks, startling Cas out of his zen bacon eating trance.

He contemplates his mostly-empty plate. “Go home, take a shower, and go back to bed.”

“Naked again by eleven. I like it.”

Cas shoves away his plate, and Dean’s hand immediately darts out and snags a neglected crispy bit, like he’d had his eye on it. “I think I’m staying here. I brought my computer in case you were mad enough to argue Benny into letting you work, but I also just want to catch up with Benny some more, and we didn’t really get to talk properly at the bar.”

“He’s busy working now.”

“Cas, have you noticed how much _we_ talk while you’re the one in the greasy apron?”

Cas finishes the dregs of Dean’s coffee, since his own was empty ages ago, and pushes Dean out of the booth so he can leave. Dean only realises Cas is grumpily stomping off intending that to be the end of the conversation when Cas is nearly at the door and he has to chase after him. He catches him and takes his hands.

“Uh, have a nice day,” he says, suddenly awkward.

“It will be if I don’t vomit before I get home.”

“I’m just going to smile like you said something adorable because I want Benny to think we’re a cutesy stock photo couple and he has no idea we’ve known each other a week.” He leans in to press his lips to Cas’s cheek again, before adding into his ear, “Which, by the way, you probably shouldn’t tell him. I’ll get to Eileen somehow before the day’s out.”

Cas barely stops himself from rolling his eyes when Dean leans back. “Great catch up, when you’re planning to lie to him.”

“I’ve already been uncomfortably honest with _one_ person this month. It’s going to make me break out in hives to try with a second.” He grins at Cas in that horrible fake way Cas is coming to hate, when Dean’s real smile is so beautiful, and he heads back to finish Cas’s bacon.

Cas takes several long, deep breaths when he’s outside, trying to work out what he should do. Going home is extremely tempting, but his heart is beating too fast and he’s feeling that deep hot ache almost louder than the sick lemony headache. The last thing he wants is the self-reflection of being alone with his thoughts, naked in the shower. He has no idea what everyone else does in that situation but he feels like he needs emotional fortification or he’ll do something stupid like immediately apologise to Dean for thinking about him.

He falls into the usual route he walks when he needs to think, hoping that mindlessly watching his feet will send his thoughts back to sleep.

It’s only when he’s past the cottages and walking with trees one side and the sea the other, that he wonders if he should have checked in with Sam, although what use he’d be he has no idea, but it’s the first day he hasn’t come to the diner, so Cas feels some sort of obligation.

He doesn’t turn back, although the thought becomes the one that loops in time with his footfalls along the track. He should check in on the way back, maybe. Sam was as sick as he was yesterday, after all – who better to commiserate non-judgementally if he’s under the weather.

A yell shakes Cas out of these thoughts; at first he thinks it was just a bird off in the trees, with a weirdly human utterance. He’s heard more unsettling things in the woods, after all. But there’s a second cry following after, and a faint cracking noise. It’s coming from further ahead up the path.

 Instantly forgetting all his own trouble, Cas freezes to listen harder, wondering if he should call for help – until he remembers his phone is a couple of miles across the bay, probably visible on the kitchen counter through the window if he had a telescope up here. He knows he’s not physically well enough to run back to town, but if there’s something happening up here, he might be able to help. And he would never run away if he felt like he could have done something, if he knows anything about himself.

So Cas carries on, tentative, listening hard for more yelling, hoping it’s a stuck hiker and something basic first aid will help, or at least one of the smaller mountain lions or whatever that isn’t Big Foot that actually lives in these woods. Dean would probably know once he was done explaining the monsters. And know what to do about it. And probably have brought his shotgun from the car.

He sees a narrow trail between the trees, more of a deer-made gap between the undergrowth than anything that indicates a real destination, and follows it towards the sound. Angry, perhaps despairing shouts fill the air, one voice alone, and the sound of sharp thumps, not far away at all now.

Cas gets to the edge of a clearing in time to see Sam, with a long branch in his hands, yell and smack it against a nearby tree so hard the branch snaps in half. He stares at it then throws it into the undergrowth a frustrated “ _Fuck off!_ ” at it. He looks around as if for the next unfortunate branch, and spots Cas, frozen on the edge of the clearing.

“I, uh, heard shouting.”

He’s expecting Sam to be furious with him, but he sags like all the anger has left him, and turns and stalks out of the clearing by another path, heading even further along the coast. Cas immediately sets after him. “Wait, Sam, are you all right?”

Sam doesn’t answer until he gets back out to the cliffs, scooping up his bag from where he’d left it by the tree on the edge of the woods. He sinks down on a fallen log which Cas knows from his own wandering along this path as a great place to sit and watch the sea. “I’m sorry you saw that.”

“Everyone needs to go into the woods and scream sometimes.”

Sam laughs to himself, clutching his bag close. Cas sits next to him, and pointedly leaves the conversation open on Sam’s side. It takes another five minutes of watching the sea before Sam speaks carefully, like he’d picked out every word and run it over in his head before opening up.

“Every day after I have been writing at the diner, I’ve come up here with my work. I stand right by the cliff edge and think about throwing the bag into the sea, and then if I’m lucky, myself.”

Cas looks past the muddy ground in front of them, to where the sea is far-away and choppy-grey. They’re high up enough he can only hear the larger waves at the bottom, beating into the rocks.

“I used to work on the sixty sixth floor of a skyscraper. The view is different, but...”

“Is that why _you_ ran away here?”

“Yes and no. It was a very unpleasant part of my job, but not the worst. You didn’t come down to the diner at all today.”

Sam drops his face into his hands. “I can’t. Eileen’s there.”

“She seemed to think things went well last night.”

“It did.”

Cas lets him have another, very long silence. The waves seem to get louder. Sam must be able to hear them from his house, and it makes Cas uneasy, if they’re shouting to him like this. At least he had been able to go home at the end of the day.

“I just – what if she gets hurt because of me? I can’t… I don’t want that to happen again. And she’s perfect, Cas. She’s so clever and funny and sweet and… I don’t want anything to happen to her. _I_ don’t want to happen to her.”

“Sam, no one ends up living in a town like this by choice without a very good reason for leaving the rest of the world behind.”

“But she’s so happy.”

“She’s happy because she’s strong, and she wants to let you in, but she can look after herself better than anyone I’ve ever known. I don’t think you could hurt her if you tried. Although. Don’t try, please.”

That gets a sniffly laugh from Sam. “Okay. I won’t.”

“Also, if you do, I’m pretty sure Benny will show up and break all your fingers one by one. I’ve seen him do it to a man who threatened his daughter.”

“What, in the diner?”

“Yeah, right there at the counter, while all the regulars watched and kept on drinking their coffee.”

“This is Benny’s town, got it.”

“Andrea’s,” Cas says automatically. “He’d rename it after her if he was mayor.”

“Is that hyperbole? You don’t seem like a hyperbole guy.”

“No, he’s told me that.”

Sam laughs again, so Cas stands up, and offers him a hand to pull him to his feet. “It’s still early in the day. Why don’t you go to the diner and work on your novel?”

“Yeah, okay. Don’t tell anyone about the whole… screaming in the woods thing. Especially Dean. I don’t want him to know any of this, okay? I still can’t get him to back the hell off, and telling him…” Sam gestures vaguely at the sea. “It’s the last thing I need. He’d probably move from your sofa to mine.”

Cas is glad Sam’s not paying attention to the blush that immediately returns to his face when he remembers Dean’s somehow now gone from crashing on his sofa to them sleeping in the same bed. Naked. “He wouldn’t think to ask. He still thinks you hate me.”

“Yeah – uh, sorry about that. It’s just… You act so familiar together, I still find it hard to believe he’s only known you a few days.”

“Uh, that’s a favour you could do in return...”


	20. Chapter 20

Dean comes in around seven, wafting the smell of the diner with him. Cas had thought he’d never want to eat again after he got in after a painful walk back, and several rounds with the toilet hacking up breakfast and hot wings, but the smell makes his stomach rumble.

“Hello, Dean,” Cas says, finally looking around from the TV when Dean doesn’t say anything.

“Hey Cas. I’m fluent in sign language now!”

Cas stares at his hands.

“No you’re not,” he eventually says out loud.

“Yes I am,” Dean signs.

“No you’re not,” Cas signs back.

“Yes I am.”

“N– oh. Very funny.”

“Hey Cas. I’m fluent in sign language now!”

“Did that take you all day to learn?”

“Pretty much. She also taught me how to call Sam ‘bitch’.” Dean finally comes into the room and flops down on the sofa with him. Cas doesn’t miss his eyes going to his firmly closed and tied robe as he gets comfortable.

“I also brought food, if you’re feeling up to it.” Dean unhooks the plastic bag that had been hanging around his elbow, and plops it in Cas’s lap. “Your favourite, apparently.”

Cas pulls out the first box and cracks it open – a cheeseburger, extra everything. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, I figure it’s a good thing I think the entire soulmate thing is crap made up by greeting card companies,” Dean says, snatching back the bag and taking out another box that he opens to reveal an identical burger.

Cas stares at him, holding his burger loosely without raising it for a bite. Some onions plop out of the back, into the box. “You have green eyes.”

“Yeah? So?”

“I never noticed. I like them.”

“You need to get _your_ eyes tested.” Dean blushes and looks away to focus on eating.

Cas thinks about how Eileen could have made Dean say anything to Cas to embarrass him when he found out, and she still taught him the exact phrase and retort he wanted.

Dean speaks through a mouthful of burger – “Hey, I bought a comfy old robe at the thrift store yesterday. Maybe we should make it a thing where we sit around naked on the sofa.”

On the other hand, he’s not sure what Eileen might have metaphorically put in his mouth that’s any worse than what Dean does by himself.

With a sigh at the loss, Dean puts down his food, with one more mournful look at the burger, and gets up to rummage around in his own pile of bags that he’s living out of. Cas remembers Dean needling him as a passing comment about doing the exact same thing – that his bed and night stand are the only furniture in that room because they were the only things already there when he moved in.

Dean’s only stayed here a couple of days, but Cas has been in town over six years. He doesn’t think about leaving, but maybe it’s harder to admit to himself that he’s really here than he had thought. And Dean says he’s only in town to sort Sam out, but then, Cas is only here to get his head together and figure out what to do next. For what it’s worth, he’s pretty sure Eileen has been house sitting in town for nearly eight years. And Sam, who threw down money on a house like he intends to stay for the rest of his life, looks to be the most accepting of his fate of them all, but then that seems to be on a basis of a series of tomorrows for the time being.

“I knew it was in the bottom of one of these bags!” Dean stands up, holding out an armful of dark grey fabric triumphantly. “Look, isn’t it great?” He lets it unfurl, a robe almost to the floor from his shoulder, a soft woollen fabric that Cas is immediately extremely envious of in his shedding towel robe.

“Aren’t you worried that it belonged to a dead person, if you got it from the thrift store?”

“Really? You have no hangups about anything except all these weird neuroses about clothes where you wear a tie to work in a diner and then nothing the rest of the time? It’s fine, they wash everything.” Dean turns it to show red initials embroidered on the pocket. “You know a T.E.P. who died here lately?”

Cas shakes his head. “Maybe it’s just been a very long time.”

“C’mon, haunted stuff is the whole point of buying second hand.” He folds the robe over his arm, looking at it thoughtfully. “Heh, that reminds me – I had a _strange_ brief enterprise selling ‘haunted’ paintings on ebay to suckers who liked ghost stories… I think I was just helping Uncle Bobby fence creepy old paintings from house clearings, now I think about it.”

“Did it work?”

“Yeah. I mean it was pretty hit and miss because we couldn’t sell from the same account, had to sell each one as a cute suburban family that got a bit nervous about the Amityville stuff happening since they bought the painting, but we made a hundred thousand bucks off one that went viral. Probably the best ghost story I ever wrote.”

“So you’re a writer too?”

Dean hugs the robe close to his chest. “So, uh, should I go change in the bathroom, or are you okay with me stripping here?”

“As you say, I have no hangups. I have never understood the point of being embarrassed about our naked bodies. But… Do what you’re comfortable with. I understand there’s different rules when it comes to intimacy, which you would understand much better than I. And, well. We’re intimate now, aren’t we?”

Dean worries his lower lip between his teeth for a moment. “Yeah, I guess we are. I don’t know what else to call this. It’s, um, not how any of this normally goes for me. Intimate. So uh. I suppose you already got an eyeful of my junk this morning, and we’re… that… so… It doesn’t matter now, does it?”

Cas is about to ask what doesn’t matter, but Dean’s face transforms, the worry dropping away, and just like that he’s grinning at Cas, throwing the robe over the back of the sofa and he yanks his shirts off as one tangle of Cas’s white dress shirt and his own black t-shirt. He kicks his boots off with thumps against the back of the sofa, and wriggles out of his trousers, then makes a point of meeting Cas’s eye and winking as he slips his thumbs under the waistband of his underwear. The back of the sofa obscures everything from that point down, but Cas finds himself unable to get bored and look away, aware that Dean is still giving a performance to him, the moment they missed when they were running around getting ready to leave in the morning.

Dean grabs the robe and pulls it over his shoulders, and walks around the sofa, still reaching around for the cord to tie it.

Cas doesn’t feel that same fire under his skin as earlier – it really all disappeared around the time he started throwing up and his body surrendered to feeling as beaten up as he’d treated it the night before – but he still feels disappointed that it doesn’t affect him. Dean’s standing there naked and cheerful, his dick bobbing between his legs half hard from all the teasing, and Cas just feels proud that Dean trusts him so much, and has made such an effort to understand him.

Now certain that his mood has been killed, the attraction blowing away as storms do, leaving things clear in their wake, Cas is relieved when Dean finally stops fumbling with his robe and ties it closed.

“Have to say, anyone else, I’d be pretty hurt by someone looking so bemused at the sight of my dick.” He sits back down and picks up his burger while Cas is still lost for words. Dean puts the burger back down. “Cas, uh – tell me if I’m crossing any lines.”

“I was attracted to you,” Cas blurts.

“What? How do you know? You said you –”

“I felt – this pull towards you. Um. More than that. I wanted to – to push you against that bathroom wall and –” He takes a shivery breath, surprised that the memory brings back such vivid feelings, even if they no longer extend as far as Dean. He’s been changed by it. “I don’t know what we’re doing here anymore, to be honest. I’ve never let anyone in as far as even being comfortable allowing them to flirt with me and flirting _back_. You already crossed every line the day you met me. Assume there are none left on my side and haven’t been the entire time.”

“Wait, but. You’re _attracted_ to me?”

“No. Uh. Not anymore.”

“Oh. What happened?”

“I saw you naked, just now.”

“Well, fuck.”

“Um, I think it’s because I feel comfortable with you and I know that absolutely nothing is happening between us. At the bar, I was not so sure. And when I thought that it might happen...”

“So you might feel like that again if I was winding you up enough?”

“I have no idea. It’s never happened before. I wouldn’t rely on it when you think you’re ready to...”

“Bump uglies,” Dean supplies, when Cas is still struggling for words.

Cas scowls at him. “If you use phrasing like that I’m probably even less likely to find you attractive again.”

Dean laughs. “Whatever. It must be nice to be able to turn it off when you don’t have time for it.”

“Is that how you feel now?”

“Hell no, this is unintentionally the hottest thing anyone’s ever done for me. Sometimes it feels like I’m in this weird kinky pact. Maybe I’ll ask for another week even when I’m ready just for kicks.”

“Are you joking?”

“God, I wish I was.” He finally picks up his burger to actually start eating it instead of gesturing with it, blushing furiously.

Cas feels annoyed at himself that Dean’s suggestion has pissed him off, like he’s actually been denied something. “You do realise that we might _never_ have sex,” he says, mostly to try and piss Dean off too, because since the first night Dean slept in his bed Cas has felt like there was a whole list of things he would happily do to keep Dean around and satisfied for the sake of having him in his life, and he’d almost been expecting make a start on the list that night, if their conversation at the bar had gone uninterrupted.

“Yeah, I know. You said at the bar – fuck dying single because this one detail gets in the way of your love life… I think you’re worth it.”

Cas hadn’t expected him to take it on the chin. He’s so surprised to find out how Dean had been treating their relationship, that he had genuinely walked into this thinking Cas didn’t want sex and offered to find a way to make it work anyway, belatedly Cas realises of Dean’s drunken confession a couple of nights ago, and how that makes him feel, that Dean hadn’t been talking about sex, but probably something more like what they’re already doing here, right now, he blurts, “That wasn’t what I was saying at all.”

“What? I’m getting whiplash here. What were you saying? Or are you saying?”

“I – uh… I had a moment of madness.”

“What, now or at the bar?”

Cas shoves his uneaten burger away, turns off the TV, and leaves the room. He goes straight to bed and pulls the covers over his head, where he can listen to how loud and fast his heart is going. He wants to ask Dean to leave – shove him away to go stay with Sam, or back at the B&B and leave him in peace. It’s all too much and not only are they not doing anything, but Dean has made it clear they won’t do anything indefinitely on his whim. Cas knows his entire mood is irrational and not helped by the hangover, from the alcohol or the weird emotional high from the night before. And the fact it is all so irrational scares him. He knows ever since Dean got to town he’s been acting not quite himself, changing into a person he barely recognises who thinks about kissing someone every time they smile, and wondering when they will have sex, and not finding a single reason why they couldn’t do it because at the end of the day, attraction doesn’t have to have a final say in if it happens or not. His heart does, and everything Dean ever says or does worms him in deeper and deeper to Cas’s heart.

And he is incredibly curious about what would happen next, once Dean’s there, if only he would get over himself and let Cas explore those outcomes instead of putting barrier after barrier between them when Dean’s perfectly capable of having sex.

His bedroom door opens again, and Dean comes in. There’s a heavy thump of his robe hitting the floor and he slides under the covers, keeping carefully to his own side.

“I’m sorry. I don’t think we were ready to have that talk for… months.”

Cas huffs in response, and rolls to turn away from Dean. Even in the dark he’s scared Dean’s face will wipe away any anger and let him forgive him immediately. He resolves to lie there in the dark and not say or do anything, hopefully until he falls asleep, and hopefully so Dean leaves with them having to discuss terms.

After a minute of grumpy silence, Dean tries a contrite second attempt at the conversation. “I think we should maybe just not talk about it anymore, until it’s a relevant issue.”

“Not talking about it. Innovative.” Dean’s strategy for everything, Cas thinks, but can’t get the heart to really argue with him.

“Cas… Thanks for telling me, about how you felt at the bar. I hadn’t realised… I don’t know, how much of an effect I was having on you. I thought you were a brick wall none of it would get past, so it was harmless flirting.”

“Are you going to stop flirting with me?”

“Do you want me to?”

“No.”

“Then I won’t. And I’ll understand if you stop me dead when I do… You’re allowed to do that. And maybe we shouldn’t mess around so much in front of Benny...”

“It wasn’t that. I’m fine with that. He wasn’t there in the bathroom when you –”

Cas thinks he hears Dean laugh smugly about that. “God, no one’s ever made you feel that before? This is really making up for how I felt when you gave my dick one out of ten with your eyes.”

“My college girlfriend was pushy. I think I pushed back too much. I enjoyed arguing with her and kissing her, and it amused me to make her wild with frustration, but I was deeply uncomfortable with how much she wanted me beyond that, before I was ready. I felt if I gave an inch, she’d start demanding we do sexual things every night. I touched her chest once while we made out and after that she moved my hands there every time without asking because she assumed that I would want to once I’d done it before.

“She knew the deal and she tried to be careful of what I wanted but I could always tell she wanted more and it made me wish every time we made out that she could just have another boyfriend who would do what she wanted, until I broke up with her so in the long term, she would. I, um. Didn’t want to talk to her about it. I regret a lot of things about that, including breaking up with her when I knew what I should have said to her once I had hindsight. It was a long time ago. The hindsight is recent.”

Dean is silent for a while, and Cas genuinely begins to drift off, at least, his heart slowing and a sense of peace falling between them after unburdening. He’s incredibly tired, he realises.

Finally Dean speaks. “My last relationships all happened way too fast. People got hurt. _I_ got hurt. I’m maybe not being totally altruistic to enjoy the arm’s length we’re keeping all this. If I don’t rush in… If I don’t lose my head over you because the sex is great and I can’t see past that… I mean, we’re pretty obviously in some sort of a relationship now, but what we’re making of it… It’s safe. I can pretend there’s a future where we do the stuff _I_ think of as the real relationship stuff, and all your stuff in the meantime… doesn’t make me feel like I’m being an emotional leech on you.”

“You’re not. I –”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll think it anyway. Um. I won’t tell you all the stupid stuff I’ve done, but one of my last real relationships, she was an old flame I bumped into and started things up again, by then she had a kid, a house, and I just… did this. Moved in with her from day one, played dad to the kid, played suburbia with her… But I mean, obviously we were having really athletic sex to distract me from all the shit that made me do that in the first place. Heh, she was a yoga teacher. And the shit caught up to me, I missed a life where I did anything other than the boring nine to five and all. I was going stir crazy and she thought I was going to propose to her any day, because we were already basically living like we were married, and I quit my boring job, started picking up weird Uncle Bobby jobs again, went on long trips with Sam just to get out of the town for a week or two, and it all fell apart because I wasn’t there for them any more, and then before I could make it right, there was a car crash, and they were alive, but I didn’t want to deal with it because if I went to them when they needed me, I’d _stay_ because I couldn’t abandon them again, and I would hate being with them on some level for the rest of my fucking life, which felt even worse than just ignoring them.

“It was a mess, and I blamed myself, and… I don’t know, I feel less stupid this time around. Like you won’t let me be stupid, and I can pace myself and be absolutely sure this is what I want. I think it is, but… You know, I don’t feel like I’m crashing into you and hiding from myself. I’ve never felt more… me… for years. I feel like I’ve woken up since I got to town.”

Cas lets him have some silence after that as well. Finally he rolls over, and reaches for Dean in the dark, tentatively finding his torso with his hand, to guide himself over to snuggle under his arm, which Dean obligingly lifts, and when they’re settled in, he runs his hand gently up and down Cas’s arm.

“I think you’re right. On my next real day off, I should probably get a dresser in this room.”


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey lovely and muchly valued readers! About to post a lot of long chapters over the next few days. Just a heads up that my indecision about what rating to give this fic has been firmly resolved, and it is now "E" so I just wanted to make sure you saw that change. I was always going to include a sexual element to their relationship, but it's decidedly more on screen than I was sure I'd be comfortable writing, before I got into it and warmed up to this story. We're also finally getting into pretty much any of the scenes I originally wanted to write between 'Dean moves to town' and here so I hope you enjoy this chunk of the story as much as I have writing it!

Benny and Andrea head off to wherever their next berth is the next morning. It’s Eileen’s day off and Sam is in the corner, pretending their deep talk the other day never happened. Dean goes to see Benny off and only drops by to get a cup of coffee, pull a face at it, and leave again – he doesn’t return all day.

As life does, a boring day becomes a routine before Cas knew it.

Without Benny around, Dean doesn’t play at being more than they are, keeping it to being flirtatious at the diner, and cuddly in private, sharing Cas’s bed without any further comment, though he often stays up long past Cas’s bedtime and is awake and moving around the kitchen already most mornings. Cas only knows he’s doing it because the sofa bed remains closed and the blankets stacked in the corner of the room exactly where they were left, and Cas usually wakes up and doesn’t mention it when Dean crawls into bed and snuggles up to him. He has to conclude Dean sleeps about four hours a night.

Dean sometimes comes to work on his laptop at the diner, and sometimes wanders around town with his camera or just to look. Occasionally he takes his car out on a drive just because he enjoys doing it, and is interested in the area. Cas figures out that the days he has no idea what Dean did, the TV is suggesting someone has watched all of the last three years of _Dr Sexy, MD_ recently. Cas is too uncertain of breaking this calm to ask Dean if it’s porn or not.

Dean is annoyed that he’s getting nowhere with Sam, but Cas’s early lead has run into a wall too, where Sam seems ashamed to have said anything. Cas solemnly warns him he’ll see him again each time they say goodbye, but that’s all he dares to do, aside from forcing far more enthusiasm than he ever normally would to do social things after work almost every day of the week. Sometimes it’s going to the bar with Sam and Dean, sometimes all four of them starting a fresh run through Game of Thrones to get them all on the same page, after it turned out each of them was in a different place in the show. Cas was halfway through the first episode before the violence put him off. He secretly doesn’t like it any better, but he does love how enthusiastic Dean is about it, and the comfort of cramming all four of them onto his or Eileen’s sofa.

At least Eileen and Sam are rapidly becoming the cutest couple in town while Benny and Andrea are not around to dispute the title. Cas gets the front row to their courtship, since most of it takes place in the diner. They’re playing it cautious, but compared to how Dean and he crashed headfirst into a glacially slow relationship development, at least they’re getting somewhere with each other.

Sam stays until Eileen’s shift ends to walk her home the days when they have nothing else planned, which also eases Cas’s worry about what he does after work.

Eileen takes her breaks at Sam’s table, talking to him and teaching him signs, then drifts around the kitchen burning everyone’s food and letting the sink flow over.

“You’re bad for business,” Cas complains, fishing a basket of shrivelled brown fries out of the deep fat fryer and throwing them in the bin.

“There’s nowhere else to get food for miles. We’re going to be all right.”

“I think Benny would be upset if you forced a rival to open in town.”

She grabs the bag of fries out of the freezer and pretends not to see that.

Another day, Cas finds Sam pouring over an odd looking dictionary the first time he comes bearing coffee. The second time it’s closed, and Cas sees it’s a baby name book.

“Are you choosing names?” he asks, surprised. He doesn’t think Sam has knocked Eileen up or that they’d even know within this timeframe since they started dating, or since Eileen was forced to teach him several signs he didn’t know but are probably in common use among regular speakers, when trying to imply how a Friday night went for her and Sam… but he does know some bizarre couple activities include fantasising about such things as baby names and it doesn’t seem immediately obvious what _else_ a baby name book is for.

Sam panics in response and knocks his thankfully empty mug to the floor as he sweeps the book under his papers.

Cas gets him a clean mug, and Sam looks a little more composed when he gets back. “It’s for naming characters,” he hisses, although he’s in no danger of Eileen overhearing, and the diner is fairly quiet of other customers. Something about it all still puts pink spots on his cheeks and makes him glance over to check she’s not watching, and Cas wonders if the question accidentally hit too close to something Sam had been doing privately, or if it startled him more than he’d like to admit to think about.

“What sort of character are you naming, and what did you call them?” Cas asks, to give Sam something to do to take his mind off it. Sam still hasn’t told him much about the novel aside from asking him how some fairly obvious words are spelled before ten, or constantly forgetting he’ll only get a blank look when he asks Cas if certain phrases sound like natural dialogue, because Cas has no idea what that’s supposed to sound like.

“Oh, um. It’s a sort of slimy businessman type. One of the villains. I’m not sure if I should go with something sinisterly generic every man type thing, or it might be thematically interesting to use one of those weirdo angel names there was a fad for about the time of his generation. I think they’re kind of silly, but...”

“Like Castiel?”

“Yeah, just like – wait, shit. _That’s_ what ‘Cas’ is a nickname for?!”

Cas nods solemnly.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I mean, for – not for the fact that’s your name, for saying it was silly. I didn’t –”

“Call him Zachariah and we’re square.”

Sam runs his hands through his hair in despair. “Got it.”

Cas fills up his coffee cup, and walks off to tell Eileen as Sam mutters _“Shit_ ,” again to himself in horror.

His horror is founded when Eileen goes to check Sam knows what her name is.

And then there’s the morning with the dog.

“What are you looking at?” he asks Sam, having watched him watch something out of the rainy window all morning instead of writing. Considering he’s secretly trying to judge Sam’s mental state by how interested in his novel he is, it’s worrying him and he doesn’t know exactly how to subtly approach that problem.

“Uh, nothing, really,” he says, pushing a smile onto his face and sliding his coffee cup over to Cas. Cas fills it up and turns to deal with clearing tables left from the breakfast rush, before Sam says, “Just – do you know whose dog that is?”

Cas looks past the rain-splatters on the glass to see a scruffy golden retriever lolloping along the seafront road, no leash or collar, but a cheerful look on its face. It is wet and dirty but doesn’t seem to be mistreated.

Cas shrugs.

“It’s been running back and forth all morning, and no one’s even come past looking like they’re missing a dog.”

“It could be a local one.”

“No, I know all the dogs in town. It’s a new one.”

“You already know _all_ the dogs in town but you only have two friends here.”

“I look out this window all day, and if you have a dog, you walk it on the beach.”

“Perhaps someone got a new dog and it’s got out and run down to the beach.”

“Maybe… Cas, the diner is like, the centre of town, right? If I catch the dog and tie it up outside, someone might come here first if they were looking to claim it?”

“I suppose so.”

“Watch my stuff.” Sam gets up and heads purposefully out of the door.

Cas keeps half an eye on the window for the next half an hour or so as Sam runs around in the rain, trying to tame the errant dog. He and Eileen are just about to place bets on how much longer it will take him, when Sam strides triumphantly back up to the diner from the beach with the dog in his arms, both panting happily after that game.

Cas looks at Eileen. “I have just remembered that Dean warned me at all costs not to let him get a dog.”

“Too late. I can already see he likes it more than me. Let me see what we have to feed it.”

Sam’s still standing at the counter talking urgently about what to do for the dog with Cas and Eileen when Dean comes in, close to lunch time.

“Sam’s getting a dog,” Cas announces before Dean can ask why Sam’s out of his seat and not even pretending to be working like normal.

“I’m not getting a dog, I’m just concerned about this stray.”

“I don’t know, Sammy, this is usually about where you start picking out names.”

“That must be why he has a name dictionary at his table.”

“Traitor!” Sam complains at Cas. He glances at Dean, to find his brother grinning at him, seeing an excellent potential for embarrassment, maybe the same underlying reasons Sam knocked a mug on the floor. On some unseen cue they both suddenly scramble towards Sam’s table, Dean trying to grapple his brother to make up for the head start he had.

“No brawling!” Eileen yells, startling them both into freezing at the unexpected sound of her raised voice. Cas tries not to smirk like the kid who is always the one getting into trouble in class and finally sees it happen to someone else.

“Sam,” she says, quieter but firmly. “Take the dog to the vet in the next town. If it’s a local runaway, it will already be registered there.”

“I’ll go with you,” Dean says quickly.

“Why?” Sam gives him a startled look.

“Y’know. To help.”

“I don’t need –”

“Hey, I didn’t have any other plans for today. Let me just get a coffee first.”

Sam’s shoulders slump. “You have until I get back with my car.” He leaves the diner without stopping to get his stuff.

Eileen rolls her eyes at the ceiling and goes back into the kitchen to vent her feelings on the dishes.

Cas pours Dean a mug of coffee as he flops down at the counter, looking perturbed.

“Are you okay?” he asks over the sound of Eileen’s angry clattering.

“Maybe you’ve missed it while you were becoming BFFs with Sam, but I haven’t been alone with him since the night he interrupted us at the bar.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure he’s avoiding me, yes.”

“Sam _can_ go to the vet on his own.”

“Yeah… I should go, though. The _only_ reason he didn’t pitch a fit about me going is because Eileen was watching.”

Cas wonders how to say anything diplomatically, and ends up on, “Sam seems to like doing things on his own.”

“Cas, he’s getting a dog. This is Sam Meltdown 101.”

“It’s just a stray.”

“Well it has bad timing.”

“I don’t understand the problem.”

Dean gestures wordlessly for a moment, only succeeding in confusing Cas further, before he blurts out, “He’s going to adopt the freakin’ dog instead of talking to me, okay?”

“You’re jealous. Of the dog.”

They both turn to look at it sitting happily outside the diner, oblivious to the discord it’s sown.

“Okay, yeah, kind of. Are you happy?”

Cas sees Sam’s car pulling up outside from past Dean’s shoulder.

“I hope you get to talk to Sam on the way.”

Dean groans and throws down the rest of his coffee. “Ugh. At least it’s just been gritty again since Benny was here.”

“I could try and –”

“No, no, we’re good.”

Sam’s already collecting the dog, with little interest in checking to see if Dean is coming, so Dean waves over his shoulder, hurrying out the door.

“See you later, sweetheart.”

Cas watches Dean leave with Sam and the dog, the brothers bickering all the way to the car and about how to get the dog to sit on the towels Sam has spread on the backseat.

They finally drive off and Dean turns to look out the window, a glance back at the diner and Cas frozen staring at him. Dean’s mouth drops open too with the sudden realisation, and cranes over his shoulder to keep his eyes on Cas, but then the car is gone from view.

Cas feels a sharp nudge between his shoulder blades, and turns to see Eileen.

“Did you go deaf too?” she signs.

It takes another moment to drag himself back to reality, but at least her hands make sense in a way sound hadn’t.

“What? Sorry.”

“What got into you? I said your name eight times,” Eileen asks, instead of doling out a chore now that the diner is truly empty, perhaps for the first time in a month.

“He – he called me sweetheart.”

Eileen doesn’t look impressed. “He has a cute name for everyone. And you’re his –” She gestures something Cas doesn’t know. She tries verbally. “His bae?”

“I still don’t know what that means.”

“Someone I think he would always call sweetheart. You’ve been together for weeks. Are you just being romantic and still sighing after him? Because there’s better things to do with your time. Peeling potatoes, for example.”

“Yes, that’s it. I’m sighing about Dean.”

“Wow, you’re a terrible liar. Explain.”

“Perhaps I should make a start on the potatoes.”

“I’m not telling you not to, just tell me what’s going on while you peel.”

Cas heads into the kitchen and feels a sympathetic cramp in his hand just looking at the sack of potatoes Eileen’s dragged out to lean against the workbench. He picks up the first potato and scowls at it. “We’ve been, uh, ‘taking things slow’.”

“Cas, he moved in with you after you’d spoken to him three times.”

“I was offering him some place to stay as a friendly gesture and you know that.”

“That may be. But you were a couple within days.”

“Something happened.”

“Something bad?”

Cas shakes his head. “Something revelatory. For the both of us.”

Eileen stares at him. “I assume you’re going to elaborate.”

“I was under the impression that sharing the details of your sex life was supposed to be embarrassing and not for polite company.”

Eileen smiles at that. “You think I’m polite company?”

“No, I – is that a bad thing?”

“No, but… You’re my closest friend and we used to talk about everything. With Sam and Dean always here, I think we think about them too much. We don’t share like we used to.”

Cas thinks privately that Eileen missed several chances to ask him about Dean before it was too weird to explain, but then he can’t have been the most attentive friend lately either. “I don’t think I’ve had a Dean-free thought since I met him,” he confesses instead of blaming her.

She laughs. “I can understand. But… Why are you surprised, then? Is everything okay with you and Dean?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t think he’d call you sweetheart.”

“In private we’re… quite reserved. It’s my fault. Of course.”

“I’m sure it’s not… You –”

Cas sticks to his defence of Dean with the very easy truth that he doesn’t mind talking about. “I have an aversion to relationships that I’ve adhered to my entire life, and he’s being very patient with me. I think he was too distracted being upset about the dog to remember how careful to be with me. It was quite disconcerting to realise he thinks of me as his sweetheart. I hope he forgets before he comes home.”

“Are you sure?”

Cas shrugs.

“If that’s truly what’s best for you, then I hope so too.” She looks completely unconvinced.

Cas looks down at the potato he’s peeled down to a single fry’s weight, and nods.

“How about you? How’s it going with Sam?” She doesn’t need to know how directly it relates to his own issues with Dean.

She gestures so-so. “He’s great to talk to about art and philosophy and poetry and the like, but he barely talks about himself. He holds me like he’s drowning. I think he carries too much on his shoulders… Do you know anything from Dean about him?”

Cas laughs at that. “All I need now is Sam to ask me what I know about you and I think every one of you has asked me for help with at least one of the others.”

“Serving the coffee does make you strangely easy to talk to.”

“ _I am not good at talking to people_.”

“And yet everyone does it anyway. You listen kindly. And never share gossip.”

Cas shrugs, hoping she knows he’s dismissing the good listener part, not the never sharing gossip part.

Eileen smiles at him, and leaves him to peel potatoes.


	22. Chapter 22

Sam and Dean don’t return until the evening, and if they had been in bad moods before, it seems positively cheerful in hindsight. There’s no sign of the dog, and Cas has a moment of fear it had to be put down for some reason until he sees that Sam is clutching a brand new lead and clearly intends to bring it home at some point.

Dean stomps into the crowded diner, freezes when he looks at Cas, then resumes stomping a moment later, clearly favouring pretending nothing changed between them.

Sam makes a beeline for the stack of books and papers Eileen left on the counter for him after the diner filled up for the evening. “I’m going home. Unless you think I can’t manage _that_ on my own as well.”

“I never said you couldn’t –”

“I’m _fine_ , Dean. As soon as you figure that out you can go back to your life, whatever that is, as you so desperately want to.”

“This _is_ my life.”

“Right, no job, no home, who knows what money you’re living off of this time, crashing on a stranger’s couch –”

Behind him, Billie splutters coffee across the counter, although the brothers don’t notice her wheezing coughs, or that the rest of the diner has not too subtly gone quiet to listen.

“You’re running away from something as much as I am, you just bought an over-priced writer’s retreat cottage to do it in.”

“You don’t get to fall off the map for years and then track me down on some extended guilt trip to reconnect with me and expect me to just tell you everything about my life. It doesn’t work like that.” Sam grabs his books and papers and leaves the diner. Dean watches him go, then kicks over an empty stool and stomps off as well, heading the other way out the door.

“I, um, sorry about that,” Cas says to no one in particular.

Billie reaches down and drags the stool upright again. “If you don’t invite me yourself to whatever that lot do for Thanksgiving I’m befriending one of them and getting through the door one way or another.”

It’s the most words she’s ever said to him. They’re suitably terrifying.

Cas offers her a coffee refill, remembers why she spilled her drink, and somehow that makes him blush and splash more coffee on the counter, which just sets her off laughing again.

Eileen comes to drag him into the kitchen and demand to know what happened.

They work out a rather helpless plan which involves them leaning on the workbench peering critically at each other’s phones as Eileen texts, “I hope everything is okay with the dog, we don’t have to talk about the rest if you don’t want x x x” and Cas tries eighteen variations on what’s worrying him and how to be diplomatic about it, accidentally sends “Are you at the bar?” and gets punched hard in the arm for doing so.

By the time they rush tidying up and close the diner early together ten minutes after the last customer leaves (Billie, still laughing at them), Eileen’s had a reply that, yes, Sam’s keeping the dog and he’ll be allowed to pick it up tomorrow. Cas hasn’t had a reply, and he owes Eileen hard that it’s his day off tomorrow and she’s agreed to come in early and mop the floors he neglected.

He detours on the way home by the bar, but can’t see Dean, and Jamie shakes her head when he asks if he’s been there. The rest of the walk he feels increasingly nervous, more aware than normal that he knows shockingly little about the brothers, including if Dean has the same self-destructive streak Sam does, and how worried he should be that Dean’s not answering.

Before he gets to his house he can see the light of the TV flickering through the front room window, and he relaxes a little. He still has to figure out how to talk to Dean about what happened – or to do as Eileen did and convey that Dean doesn’t have to talk and that’s okay. He finds Dean easier to talk to than most people but that doesn’t mean he thinks this will be simple.

He lets himself in and offers a tentative, “Hello, Dean,” at the door as he kicks off his shoes and hangs up his coat. He gets a vague grunt in reply, so he comes into the living room to see Dean stretched out on the sofa in sweatpants and a t-shirt, watching a medical drama, which quickly makes itself known as the mysterious _Dr Sexy, MD_ that has cluttered up Cas’s DVR, since one of the other characters says that name with a perfectly straight face.

“What sort of a name is ‘Dr Sexy’? That can’t possibly be on his medical licence.”

Dean sits up a bit, thumps the sofa cushion next to him, and makes another barely legible request. It looks like he’s had one crappy microwave meal and a single beer that’s only half-drunk, so Cas thinks he’s mostly sulking. Since Dean’s letting Cas sit with him, he doesn’t argue, just joins him and lets him wrap an arm around Cas’s waist, his head falling heavily on Cas’s shoulder.

They watch in silence for a while, but maybe Dean can hear Cas frowning at the nonsensical plot, because he begins muttering backstory and character profiles that make the word ‘sexy’ lose all meaning. It clearly begins cheering him up because at the commercial break between episodes he gets up to use the bathroom and when he comes back he makes Cas stretch out on the sofa, and rejoins him by climbing on top of Cas and snuggling up to him with a long sigh.

Five minutes into the next episode Cas is beginning to get the hang of the plot, and is about to ask Dean if his suspicions about a character’s motives are correct, when he realises Dean’s not watching any more, the way he’s shifted around getting comfortable eventually obscuring the television entirely from view behind Cas. When he looks down at Dean, he smiles back gently and shifts in to press his lips to the side of Cas’s neck.

“What are you doing?”

“Spite, mostly.” Dean kisses Cas again, less chastely so Cas can feel the heat of his mouth against his skin. “You heard him, we’re in for the long haul.” Another kiss, longer, and Cas can feel the suction of his mouth in a way that’s starting to make that entire side of his body tingle. “And he doesn’t even fucking _know_ about us.” Dean trails the kisses down towards Cas’s collarbone, his hand coming up to pull on his tie to loosen it. “I wonder how obvious we have to be for him to see it.”

Cas puts his hand on Dean’s to stop him messing with his tie. “Dean, you’re trusting me to look after you and stop you from going too far… From what you’ve told me, I really do not recommend making out with me in front of Sam just to prove a point, when you still feel uncertain about what it means between us and for your own reservations.”

“Well that’s why I’m trying to make out with you _now_ so we’re cool with it later when I’m doing it to spite him.”

“I don’t think you have thought this plan through all the way. I would assume you’re going to feel terrible about it later. Whatever I might feel, you will think you used me. There may be better ways to convey what you need to Sam to clear up this misunderstanding, as this is clearly another thing where you and your brother are terrible at communication.”

“Ugh, you’re getting formal again.”

Cas ignores him, and his attempt to unclench Cas’s hand and twist their fingers together. “For example, have you ever properly come out to him?”

Dean’s hand stills a little too suddenly. Cas doesn’t feel too bad about stomping on a sensitive nerve in order to save Dean from himself. “Uh. I assume he knows. I got expelled from two different schools for making out with someone from the football team behind the bleachers, and let me tell you, Dad did not warm up to the idea the second time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Nah, he never, you know, tried to beat the gay out of me or anything. Which wouldn’t work since I’m bisexual anyway, but, you know. Made for some pretty frosty cross-country drives as he relocated us about as far from the previous school as possible. Told me my mother would be ashamed if she knew and that I was bringing disgrace on the family.”

“Oh, I’m sorry about your mother...”

“Huh? Oh, no, she’s not dead. Um. It’s complicated.”

“Okay. Should I ask?”

“Maybe not now. I don’t mind talking about her, but… You’re kind of killing the mood.”

“Have you considered that I’m doing it deliberately? So you’re certain Sam knows that you’re attracted to men as well?”

Dean grimaces at Cas’s determination. “I’ve literally ditched Sam when we’ve been doing stuff like going to concerts or whatever to hook up with guys. And women. I mean, mostly women, because it’s pretty hard to pick up a dude when you’ve got your brother hanging around by you at a bar and not have a really awkward conversation about if he’s part of the deal… Actually, maybe that never happened because after one conversation like that, I stuck with just eyeing up the hot chicks because it’s easier, and it’s not like Sam and I ever went to gay bars for fun. Together.”

“I’m starting to get the feeling he has no idea you would even hypothetically be interested in me this way.”

“Cas, setting aside the depressingly close quarters I grew up with Sam in and all our adult lives and various escapades and… everything else I might have ever done to let him know, up to and including that time we went on a set tour of Dr Sexy for my birthday one year as what he thought was an ironic prank present after he couldn’t get into a better tour, and I thought was the most fucking awesome thing ever, and the man himself came up to us and said hello and I practically creamed my pants right then and there… I can not possibly have been climbing all over you in front of Benny pretending we were already hooking up, _in front of Sam,_ and at the exact same time had him thinking we were just friends.”

“Sam left early that evening.”

“What? Oh, shit. He did. You really think he has no idea?”

“I told him if Benny asked, that you had given him the impression you’d been in town much longer, which probably didn’t help his impression of you, now I understand it better. I was being careful not to tell him too many personal details about why because everyone seems to agree it’s impolite to share details of your sex life with others unprompted, and especially with siblings, so I thought you wouldn’t want him to know it was about pretending you had been having sex with me for weeks.”

“Shit, Cas, you should have just told him we were fucking.”

“I thought he’d be suspicious that we were, or have something of an idea from our interactions in front of him, but clearly he still thinks I’m a long-suffering bystander putting up with you, and you’re just interested in my sofa and the cheap accommodation you’ve suckered me out of. Billie spat coffee all over the diner when he said it. You didn’t notice?”

Dean sighs and flops his head back onto Cas’s shoulder. “That’s taken all the fun out of making out with you to spite him.”

“Good. I’d rather you wanted to make out with me because you liked me.”

“Obviously I do.”

“I know.”

Dean is quiet for a while, lying where he can see the television. On it, Dr Sexy is talking to a nurse, who suddenly kisses him passionately against the wall of the operating theatre. Cas has tuned his brain back into the show too late to know if there’s a patient there or not, but he supposes this show has no basis in medical reality. The nurse lets go of Dr Sexy, stares at him for a moment, and then slaps him and walks off. Dean shifts around in Cas’s arms.

“You’re really turned on by this character, aren’t you?” It’s not an educated guess.

“He gets slapped about six times an episode by various sexy nurses. There’s a drinking game.”

“Maybe we should play it some time.”

“I thought you were trying to de-escalate things between us.”

“Oh. When you say drinking game, do you mean something else?”

“I mean, getting trashed while watching sexy people make out does tend to have a fairly predictable conclusion to activities...”

Cas laughs, and strokes Dean’s arm gently. “I would like to do that some day, when you’re ready.”

“Cas.”

Cas feels his stomach sink at how serious Dean sounds, and lets go of his arm at once. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine…” Dean sits up, pushing Cas’s legs away, so Cas sits up too. “This is, um. Nothing to do with you. You’re making not rushing things extremely hard. But, uh, don’t tell him, but Sam is right, there’s stuff I’m dealing with that I’m dragging you into and I haven’t even told you. And it’s not about trust or how much I care or whatever, you’re just… I mean this in the nicest possible way… as much of a distraction as Sam getting a dog.”

Cas sighs and sits up, letting Dean squirm out from underneath him. He doesn’t know what to say or think so he just stares at the TV.

Dean reaches for his hands, and links their fingers. “I’m not saying I want to backtrack anything, Cas. I just… I know I’m being a hypocrite, in a completely different problem from anything to do with us directly. Sam’s right, I deliberately didn’t tell him where I was and what I was doing for years. He’s figured out a totally inaccurate picture from things Mom has said or Charlie or I don’t know… fucking Marv, probably. And, not blaming you because you’ve been doing so well for _us_ , you’re good for me in a way that terrifies me at how perfectly we balance each other out, but you’re not helping by telling him even more things which get him confused about who I am.”

Cas looks over at him, wondering if he should ask who Marv is, or if this really isn’t the time and especially not the take away from that speech that Dean would have expected. “So what doesn’t he know? Or do you not want to talk about it?”

“Shit I’m embarrassed about. Other shit I’m running away from. It’s all behind me but… I guess Sam doesn’t know any of it and it’s not just his fault we stopped being best friends years ago, and I’m scared to tell him that, because then I have to tell him everything.”

“Dean… It might surprise you to know I can sympathise – that I’m here too because I’m running away.”

“What? No shit.”

“You knew?”

“Cas, you live like the most sketchy existence ever here. No one starts their life over with a single suitcase and an empty house when things are great.”

It’s hard to know where to look now, because Cas knows the ceiling is flaking, the walls are dirty and water damaged around the windows, the floor is bare, and his television is sitting on the box it came in, and the sofa is obviously not new, even if it’s clean and the pull out still works fine, and the cushions have only hardened and sagged as much as any well-loved furniture might, just that they’re not just his butt-grooves.

“Do _you_ want to talk about it?” Dean asks.

“Not to barter for the story of what you’re running away from.”

“Nah, I wouldn’t do that to you. I mean, I get it more than anyone.”

Cas thinks maybe Dean should employ some of that empathy with Sam, but he thinks also perhaps when it comes to Sam, for Dean it’s more difficult than just saying something like this. Dean makes a little more sense to him now too, just knowing that there is nothing he wants to look at behind him, and Cas sees the temptation he offered Dean to move ahead in a much clearer light. “Maybe one day soon. Not now.”

“No?”

Cas catches Dean’s chin in his hand and runs his thumb across his lower lip, enjoying the way Dean’s eyes flicker closed and he breathes out softly. “I’ve promised to look after you and not let you hurt yourself. So now we’re going to watch more of your ridiculous borderline pornographic medical drama until you’re tired enough to sleep, and then I will take you to bed and hold you. And in the morning, I’m going to take you furniture shopping.”

Dean shivers all over, and leans urgently back towards Cas, who easily dodges the attempt to kiss him, as Dean knew he would, as he laughs at himself, and settles back in under Cas’s arm. “Cas, you’re a gift, you know that?”

“No, I’m incredibly selfish. I want to keep you.”

Dean buries his face in Cas’s neck again, and mumbles something that sounds like, “It’s a deal.”


	23. Chapter 23

Cas dreams of the diner, as he often does. Dean is there, which is a first. He won’t get down from the counter, sitting on it by the cash register, reaching for Cas and pulling on his tie every time Cas tries to go serve someone else.

It’s frustrating but not in the way where Cas is annoyed – he _wants_ to give himself completely over to Dean and forget everything he’s supposed to do, he’s just scared that he’ll get in trouble, and this is already the most erotic dream he’s ever had and enjoyed just because it’s Dean teasing him and leaning so close his mouth hovers hot over Cas’s without letting them give in, leaning away every time Cas goes to kiss him until Cas is desperate and hanging on Dean instead of trying to shoo him away.

Then Andrea (who has never worked a day in the diner in her life) comes out of the kitchen, takes off her apron, and tells Cas she’s coming back with Sam in five minutes so make it quick, as if they’ve just agreed the only reason Cas can’t take Dean right there on the counter is because someone else is in the diner with them. Cas finds himself panicked by the deadline and he lets Dean haul him onto the counter, and then they’re kissing and somehow naked. Cas shoves Dean back into the pastry display and in some confusing sequence of events and a counter impossibly long and wide when he’s thinking of a space that in reality that Dean would struggle just to sit on, they’re laying on the counter, Cas desperately taking Dean into his mouth, that dream-like terror that something bad will happen if he doesn’t get him off before –

He wakes up, rock hard, half-smothered by Dean’s arm, his leg hooked around Dean to press himself tightly against him, his thigh muscles cramping like he’d been rocking against Dean in his sleep. Dean’s face down in the pillow snoring, and he smells so good that Cas’s dick gives another twitch just to breathe him in, the panic about how appropriate this is swapping into the place of his waking up anxiety for leaving dream Dean hanging. Cas thinks it’s the first time he’s woken up before him since they met, that one chaotic and hungover morning aside. It’s very early, earlier than Cas’s alarm normally goes off, judging by the patch of sunlight on the wall, and sleep delirium is wearing off slowly.

Cas sighs, weirdly relieved to be out of the dream. He’s never had a sex dream about anyone he’s remotely had a crush on before; even the awkward and never-to-be-spoken-of-again business trip with his then co-worker Hannah had affected exactly nothing about how he dreamed though it was both surreal and involved a lot of unwanted nudity so if anyone should have managed to get a remotely appropriate but unwanted guest starring role… Usually he hates the rare but embarrassing and weird dreams about completely unexpected people, as random faces supplied by his subconscious to fill the gap when his sex drive requested missing files. He hates that it feels more real even when it’s made up by his brain with no input from his own desires when it comes to Dean, who suddenly filled in all the missing data of what his unconscious mind had been seeking.

Of course it would be the hottest dream he’s ever had, after falling asleep haunted by how turned on Dean had been the entire evening under the thin excuse of Dr Sexy, shifting his hips against Cas and sighing and adjusting himself all evening. Dean had been awkward and shy about getting into bed, and Cas had gently bullied him into snuggling and Dean had made a very ‘fine, so be it’ face before pressing his erection into Cas’s side.

Cas seriously needs to stop pretending he is probably going to be above it all, at least when it comes to Dean. Falling asleep wondering how dramatically it would crash and burn their trusting relationship to just fellate Dean then and there was a definite contributing factor to his embarrassment now, and he deserves it. He hadn’t even felt like he wanted sex, just that he wanted to do it for Dean because being close to him just lying on the sofa together filled his heart with to bursting that Dean was happy and peaceful, knowing there was something beyond that he could so easily offer him to make Dean even happier… It was a strange feeling, selfish and un-selfish at the same time and he didn’t know which one motivated him more, and he hadn’t figured it out before he fell asleep and eventually made his way to his subconscious’s attempt to answer the question.

He gently pries himself out from under Dean’s arm, having decided from that thought, that acting embarrassed now would also be suicide to the image he wants to project of being trustworthy and open, and that this _is_ a normal healthy expression of affection in a relationship. Dean has never pretended not to be attracted to Cas.

Sitting up didn’t do anything, so Cas reaches over and strokes Dean’s hair until he grumbles and rolls over onto his side, then cracks open an eye. “You’re awake.” He doesn’t sound entirely pleased about it.

“I’m taking us into town to go furniture shopping, remember.”

“What? Now?”

“I’ll make you breakfast first.”

“You hate cooking at home.” That makes Dean open his eyes again to look more suspiciously at Cas, and after squinting up at his face his eyes wander down and fix on Cas’s lap. Cas feels a thrill of excitement that it’s entirely in Dean’s court to decide if they have sex, and after all his putting Dean off for his own good last night, this is different. Because Cas says so.

“It’s my day off,” Cas tells him, answering his question and reminding him very firmly that he has nowhere else to be today. “I have to make myself breakfast too.”

Dean buries his face back into the pillow. “Wow, I’ve really changed you.”

“How so?”

“You used to be a grumpy asshole. Now you’re _my_ grumpy asshole.”

“Keep talking and I won’t bring you coffee.”

“I’m sorry, is that a threat or a kind gesture?”

Cas gets out of bed and shuffles off to the kitchen without looking back at Dean.

He smiles to himself the entire time he’s cooking, though. Being away from Dean for a few minutes lets him calm down and let this feeling sink back down to a low burning tension, but he can at least face Dean when he comes shuffling into the kitchen after taking ages in the bathroom. Dean meets his eye and smiles shyly, shaking his head in disbelief as Cas hands him coffee.

Cas considers telling him about the dream, but Dean starts talking at once about their much-delayed furniture shopping trip as if he needs the distraction as much as Cas.

It takes them a while to leave the house, good-naturedly arguing about what they need to get and what’s urgent and what they’re clearly just dreaming of. Cas realises Dean is talking very carefully around implying he’s moved into Cas’s room permanently, saying _your_ room, _your_ bed, _your_ curtains, all while getting dressed from the bags still shoved in the corner of the spaciously empty living room where Dean has supposedly been crashing the entire time, and not mentioning a thing about what he might get for himself except mentioning he’d like a proper desk to work at.

Sam’s been over enough times watching Game of Thrones now and it only occurs to Cas, watching Dean demonstrating the sniff test on his favourite purple shirt, that Sam probably drew the conclusions he did because of how transient they act about this. He’s not to know Dean has probably just been avoiding their two laundry piles blurring together completely in a protest against Cas’s lack of furniture.

“What are you going to do next about Sam?” he asks.

Dean blinks at him for a moment, surprised by the change in subject. “Uh. Wait, I guess. He warmed up to you soon enough. I’m his brother, he’s got to forgive me sooner or later.”

“He thinks you just being in town is imposing on him.”

“Well, maybe if I can convince him somehow that we’re together after he missed every clue he’ll realise I’m not just here for him. That I’ve found something here.”

Cas feels his face growing very hot and it’s Dean’s turn to smile smugly, and usher Cas towards the door.

He catches Dean’s arm when they’re on the street and Dean heads to his car on instinct. “We’re taking my truck.”

“Your truck?”

Cas gestures it sitting inconspicuously on the verge between his house and the next. “It’s much better for bringing back furniture.”

“I had no idea you had a truck.”

“How did you think I got around?”

Dean glances over his shoulder, down the road at the beige Continental parked to block the drive. “I don’t know, I thought you just caged lifts off everyone.” He looks back at Cas and narrows his eyes, then looks at the Continental again. “That’s your car as well? Because I have been meaning to go ask the neighbour to move it so I can park properly.”

Cas grins.

“What? God, it _is_ your car, isn’t it?”

“I can’t drive it any more but I didn’t know what else to do with it.”

“Sell it for scrap?”

“I like it. I have a lot of memories with this car.”

“I can fix it for you.”

“I have the truck now.”

Dean waves off the conversation. “We’ll discuss this later. Your house is the first disaster zone on my list.”

So Dean has a list.

Cas isn’t sure he likes driving with Dean. On the one hand, it’s more time with Dean. On the other, it is time with Dean watching Cas’s hands on the steering wheel and whenever he catches Cas’s eye, grinning and pretending he isn’t treating Cas’s driving like a ticking time bomb.

He relaxes after a few minutes, once they’re on the straighter road out of town. The old farm houses are just visible between the trees, and Dean cranes to look.

“Remember how we nearly made out in that one?”

“I remember how it was filthy and spider infested and I thought not in a million years.”

 Dean chuckles, shaking his head like, no, he’s right.

“How is that project going anyway?”

“Ah. Half a dozen years out of the industry? I have a lot to re-learn and a lot of new things to learn which replaced all the things I’m re-learning. And I’m not asking Charlie for anything until I can prove I deserve it.”

Cas nods, and decides this is probably all in the territory of things Dean will eventually explain later to him. He remembers Dean attributed Charlie as the reason he went to college, but that seems to be an event mired in Dean’s unanswered for years. He’s not even sure any more if it was the start, middle, or end of Dean’s recent experience.

“You do deserve it,” Cas eventually says.

Dean shakes his head, but at least doesn’t argue with Cas, who feels ready to stand his ground as long as he has to. He turns the radio on instead, and groans at the local radio station coming through scratchy and broken between the trees.

“What is with this place and the horror movie aesthetic? I feel like we’re the lost couple who are about to get axe murdered because we don’t heed the warning of the radio cutting out when we stop to hook up in the back of your truck. Do you have any tunes here?” he asks, opening the glove compartment and closing it again immediately when he sees nothing but the truck manual.

Cas needs a moment to get over the direction Dean’s brain went, before he says, carefully, “I just listen to the radio.”

Dean demonstrates it spitting and crackling over an unidentifiable song. “That’s the real horror story here; you not having any music.”

He leaves the radio on, either optimistic about the signal coming back, or because he likes the effect. Cas figures it’s probably not the right time to tell him about his dream, even if Dean is apparently thinking about having sex with him right now in the silence that fell on their conversation. Cas does look at the back of the truck in the rear view mirror, wondering if it’s long enough for them to stretch out in.

The music comes back as they leave the woods behind for the edges of the bigger town. Dean fiddles with his phone when they’re back in signal and announces that the IKEA is on the other side of town.

A minute later, he asks Cas to pull over in the middle of town. “It’s the vet we went to yesterday.”

“I don’t think we should take a strange dog to IKEA. Sam’s picking it up later.”

“Nah, just wanna do something fast.”

Cas follows him into the vet and watches Dean charm an update on the dog out of the receptionist, then he whips out a credit card and pays for all the bills, a sack of the recommended dog food, and more of the basics they carry such as a bed and all the dog toys.

“My brother will pick it all up later,” he promises and drags Cas back to the truck rather like they’re making their escape.

“Didn’t he accuse you of having stolen money last night?” Cas asks, as he starts the truck again.

“Well, _I_ know that I earned every cent of it.”

“He’s still going to hate that you did this.”

“We’ve established that he resents me already, thanks. Now I’m pretty much free to do what I like for him without worrying if it will upset him or not.”

Cas doesn’t really get it, but he supposes at least one day Sam might appreciate it. He remembers how angry Sam had been with him when he thought that Cas had conspired with Dean to find him, rather than doing it for selfish reasons. All that ire had shifted to Dean in whole, since somewhere along the way Sam had realised Cas wasn’t lying, even if he hadn’t realised _why_.

Fragments of Dean’s life are starting to make Cas wonder if his joyful second chance feeling that seems to be motivating him is, whether he’ll admit it or not, because Cas is now harbouring a retired con man.

And he only has his trust that Dean truly likes him to reassure him that he’s not being conned too.

It’s probably as irrational as everything else Cas has done because of Dean so far, but he feels that someone conning him wouldn’t keep casually mentioning their suspicious activities with ‘Uncle Bobby’ quite so often.

Or smile quite so softly when Cas stops the truck in the vast lot outside the vaster IKEA warehouse and say, “Let’s get freakin’ matching _everything_ for the house.”

It makes Cas’s heart fill with a fresh round of affection in an already overflowing vessel.

Dean leads the way into the store and Cas follows in a contented daze as Dean grabs a large cart and immediately launches into a monologue about what they should buy, filled with dismissive opinions on everything from Swedish furniture to Cas’s ability to go six years without any of the aforementioned furniture. Cas lets him talk and design the floor plans he wants in his mind. All Cas really wants is Dean doing exactly this sort of thing with him forever, so Dean quickly gives up the “It’s your house, what do you want?” thread.

Cas gets the impression that Dean is going to insist on paying for all of this as well, when he drops an armful of cushions into the cart without asking.

“You want a new sofa?” Dean asks, leaning on the cart to take them to the next section of furnishings, and finding one of the more comfortable looking sets of furniture so far.

“I like my one.”

Dean abandons the cart to flop down on the show sofa. “This one is really comfy. C’mon.”

Cas sits tentatively on the edge. It feels harder than his sofa, just over-designed to make it more expensive. “I don’t like it.”

Dean pulls a face. “Then I hate it too. Come on, this room is garbage, let’s try the next one.”

“We could keep the old sofa.”

Dean just leads him into a maze of tiny staged living rooms. He’s determined to sit on all the sofas, testing them for squishiness and how easy they are to stretch out on. On the most promising, Cas finds himself pulled into a cuddle similar to how they lay the night before, and Dean pulling him around and nuzzling him in an attempt to trick him into saying yes to a sofa is starting to make Cas feel that hot weird feeling again. And the store is a seemingly endless procession of sofas that Dean wants to sit on, pull Cas onto his lap or crawl onto Cas’s, make him test how they can stretch out together, or trying to argue a shorter loveseat is snug, his boundaries rapidly disappearing as he slides a hand down Cas’s thigh while grinning at him with a look that says he thinks the next sofa is the best yet to have sex on, and that they’re going to regret not planning for that long-term.

Dean _knows_ how Cas woke up that morning, so Cas can only conclude he’s being punished for making Dean start the day with that visual. He slides away from Dean’s touch with his trousers straining at the front, and thankfully they escape the Trial of Sofas.

The next corner of the maze of furnishings takes them to a series of tiny model kitchens. Dean pauses to look at the pots and pans arranged on the counter of the first, still grinning and playful and like he hasn’t done anything wrong and they can just keep going about their normal furniture shopping like they’re not using this warren of home goods as a battle ground. Cas glances around to make sure they still have the area to themselves, early morning on a weekday the store mostly empty, and then he comes up behind Dean, sliding his arms around his waist and breathing in the back of his neck, the same way Dean has been doing to him on the sofas. Dean makes an alarmed yelp and clutches at the counter, his head falling back on Cas’s shoulder, pressing back against him on instinct.

“I had a dream about you,” Cas says, crowding him closer to the counter. Cas feels him shiver all over.

“I gathered,” Dean gasps, and takes a deep breath before talking in a somewhat more normal voice - “Did we do it in your k-kitchen?”

“On the counter in the diner,” Cas growls in his ear.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Dean says, his voice breaking again.

“I’m feeling incredibly attracted to you today, so can you stop making a pass at me every time we sit on a sofa?” Cas slides his hands down Dean’s waist, gripping his hips to pull him even closer, his own hips trembling from the effort of not pushing back.

“What’s this then?” Dean wheezes.

“A demonstration of my self control today.”

“ _What_ self control?”

“I think I’m running out, and this is going to get embarrassing for me before I give in and touch you any more than this, so please don’t make a fool of me.” Cas steps away from him, leaving Dean leaning over the counter, gasping, and he takes over control of the cart, hunching over it.

“Noted,” Dean says in a strangled voice, and Cas moves the cart through half a dozen sections of the store, browsing slowly without really looking, until Dean catches him up, still walking awkwardly. He puts a kitchen set in a huge box into the cart, and doesn’t look at Cas until they clear that section and are among seemingly hundreds of tiny bedrooms.

“We _really_ don’t need a new bed,” Cas says, as soon as Dean opens his mouth.

“I wasn’t going to ask. Uh, you want a dresser that matches it kinda, though?”

“Yeah, I suppose so. Do we need to get one large enough for all your lumberjack shirts?”

Dean bristles at him, stammers over a reply, but his face betrays him conceding the point before he gives up and goes to pull drawers out of the nearest dresser, transferring his endless need to touch things from Cas to the display furniture.

Cas smirks and watches him, feeling more relaxed after several resounding victories. Maybe Dean feels like this all the time – watching the object of his affection with a beautiful certainty about how things could go between them if he just made the right moves, and feeling how easy it would be. Cas could sit on any of these showroom beds and pat the space beside him and he could see in his mind’s eye exactly how Dean would sit beside him and grin and ask Cas if he ever figured he’d get banned from IKEA in the process of losing his virginity, to which Cas would be able to laugh it off and kiss him and slide a hand between Dean’s legs to feel just how this teasing has affected him…

They complete most of the rest of the maze with Cas spaced out watching Dean walk ahead of the cart.

He dimly remembers asking Dean what attraction felt like and getting an answer that in no way warned him how dangerous it could be.

“You want to get lunch here?” Dean asks, breaking through Cas’s daze. Cas looks down at the stacked up cart with surprise at how many home goods Dean has picked up.

“I think you’ve earned it.”

Dean swears by the IKEA meatballs but when they have their food Cas pushes them around the plate, unconvinced.

“What?”

“They’re really unsettling.”

“You don’t like meatballs?”

“These ones look strange. I don’t like the look of the creamy sauce.”

“Here, close your eyes and open your mouth.”

Cas dutifully does so, and a moment later a meatball is pushed gently past his lips, followed by Dean’s thumb swiping under his mouth. He opens his eyes, chewing thoughtfully, to see Dean suck his finger clean. He realises he has been caught, and his ears turn red as he looks away. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” Cas asks.

“I – being soppy like this. I don’t normally do this sort of thing at all.”

“I don’t normally spend a morning with someone thinking about how we would have sex in every room in an IKEA. I think it’s fair to say we’re broadening each others’ horizons.”

“I-I’ll broaden your horizons.”

“Uh, what?”

Dean laughs and steals a meatball off Cas’s plate, having finished all of his already. “I was thinking this furniture is pointless if I don’t redecorate the house first. I saw a hardware store on the way into town. We should pick out some paint colours. And freakin’ carpets. I am so tired of getting splinters every time I walk barefoot.”

“I don’t have much free time to help you do that.”

“That’s okay, I want to.”


	24. Chapter 24

After how handsy Dean was in the furniture store, the slightly busier hardware store leaves Cas feeling like he has an empty ache in his chest as Dean walks a safe distance away from him around the aisles.

When they go to get paint mixed, Dean claps Cas on the shoulder in that insincere way he has and talks too much too loudly about doing up his buddy’s house.

“Why do you care about their opinion?” Cas asks, a few steps away from the paint mixing station. It causes Dean to look over his shoulder and push Cas around the corner.

“I just don’t think hardware stores are exactly where two dudes should go to hold hands, you know?”

“We never hold hands anywhere.”

Dean sighs irritably, “Yeah okay.” He grabs Cas’s hand and pulls him to the counter to pay, turning it into a production of not wanting to let go even while he is struggling to pull his wallet out of his opposite pocket. Cas scowls at him but at least the cashier is a bored teenager who Cas assumes would be prone to being accepting and at least too apathetic to say anything if he wasn’t. Dean leads Cas out of the store still clinging to him, giving the next customer in line a filthy look over his shoulder even though he hadn’t even noticed their linked hands.

Cas thinks he’s being ridiculous but at least he’s getting an interesting lesson in being attracted to someone _despite_ them acting like an idiot, which is something he’s been perpetually curious about, wondering if the conflicting emotions wouldn’t cancel out. They don’t. He resents everything about this. But he helps Dean load paint cans and new tools into the back of the truck, feeling the heat return to his stomach to watch him hauling the heavy things easily around. Cas knows he’s strong enough to lift them all himself, but watching Dean do it makes him want to crowd Dean against the side of his truck and kiss him.

Dean catches him looking. “What?” he snaps, clearly assuming Cas is still annoyed with him.

“I was wondering if it’s possible to die from sexual frustration.”

“I fucking hope not.” He takes the cart away and leaves Cas to get into the truck and start the engine.

He takes several deep breaths while he waits for Dean to come back, trying to will away all his feelings so he can drive clear-minded.

Dean gets back into the truck, slides over and turns Cas’s face with his hand, and kisses him. Cas grabs handfuls of Dean’s shirt and jacket and hauls him closer, letting the kiss turn open-mouthed and dirty, too shocked to think about if this was a good idea or not. He returns every suck and nibble Dean presses on him so his lips are practically humming with the feeling, until Dean is the one who lets go and sits back, panting, mouth swollen and red, and looking extremely pleased with himself while Cas is stunned. “If we didn’t have so much valuable crap in the back, I’d say we should go check into a motel right now.”

“Please don’t cheapen the moment.”

“You can talk, you’ve been unbelievably frustrating today. You telling me off about nearly making you come in your pants just about did _me_ in too. Now you suddenly got a sex drive out of nowhere, you’re like an unstoppable force of nature.”

“I always had a sex drive, I just wasn’t driving it at you.” Cas sighs, and looks down at his lap, where his traitorous erection is back. “I feel responsible for teasing you too much and pushing.”

“No, Cas, I’m totally okay with where this is going. We’ve been reaching breaking point all day. I kinda figured since you woke me up boner first that today was the day.”

“Just last night we were having serious conversations about how we should approach this relationship cautiously for _your_ sake. I broke the trust you put in me to look after you.”

“Cas, like at least half of that was playing around with your sexy control freak dynamic just because you get me so worked up acting the way you do with the tie and the-the eyebrow and...”

“Dean, it’s not a game. I don’t _want_ to take up all your attention when you say I’m a distraction, and you’re here to help Sam, and he’s –” Cas stops himself short.

“He’s what, Cas?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, don’t ‘nothing’ me now. I don’t fucking care about if we made out or not before some magical time we were supposed to admit what this is between us, but I do care if you’re not telling me something important because you don’t trust me to know it.”

“Sam doesn’t trust you to know it, I’m just trying to hold onto his trust too.”

 Dean sinks back into his seat. “Fine, take us home.” His voice sounds too blank, and it hurts Cas immediately. Maybe it is emotional blackmail.

“Just… Tomorrow, about five or so, go up the path past Sam’s house and hang out in the woods there. Take your camera and take some photos.”

“I never do nature photography. Sam knows that much about me.”

“Well you can see all the town from up on the cliffs. Maybe you wanted a picture of it from far away.”

Dean nods. “Okay. I get it. You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

“I promised Sam, and as much as you mean to him, he’s clearly in need of a wider support group than just you. Dog included. I think he’s been hurt before when it comes to trust, and I’m not throwing away the trust _I_ won with him after such a bad start. You’re much easier to win it back from than he is.”

Dean laughs to himself. “God, yeah. It takes about five minutes for me to stop being mad at you.” He sighs, and is quiet for a while, until they drive far enough out of town the radio is all static again. He seems to remember the drive in, anyway. “Sure, you wanted to kill the mood, and you succeeded. But you think I’m going to forget that you kissed back like that?”

“No. I don’t want you to forget either.”


	25. Chapter 25

They unload the truck for what feels like an hour, until the hall and front room are stacked high with their new purchases. Exhausted, Cas suggests they flop where they’re standing and watch television. Dean shakes his head and says he wants to stop by the diner for food, and to see if Sam brought the dog back.

Sam’s not at the diner, and Eileen says he only stopped by for breakfast. Cas tries not to feel too uneasy especially considering Sam and the cliffs is on his mind again, but Dean doesn’t seem to feel like waiting to play any games right then. After they eat, sitting at one of the tables with the worst view of the counter which Cas doesn’t think he managed to pick subtly enough, Dean pulls Cas all the way up the hill to go knock on Sam’s door, where happy barking noises greet them from the other side.

The door eventually cracks open with Sam holding back the dog by its collar, distracted enough to let Dean push in and Cas to come in apologetically behind him.

“So what are you calling him?” Cas asks, bending down to pet the dog hello, while Dean edges around it and heads into the kitchen.

“Bones,” Sam says distractedly, glancing down the hall at Dean taking three beers from the fridge. “Did you know Dean paid for everything?”

“Yes, I drove him to the vet.”

“Did you try and stop him?”

Cas shrugs. “Some stuff is all between you two. I’m trying to advise him not to do anything too stupid but I’m not sure it’s working.”

“Trust me, last time he tried to cheer me up, he took me to a strip club. Your presence is helping.”

“Uh, well I haven’t told him _not_ to do that...” Cas wonders if now’s the time to casually tell Sam the deal between himself and Dean, but Dean’s yelling at them from the sitting room to join him, and Bones suddenly remembers there’s another person in the house, and hares off to slobber all over Dean.

“Dean’s really not a dog person,” Sam says to Cas, as they watch him trying to politely push Bones away with a look of horror on his face.

“He’s a cat person?”

“No, he’s allergic and hates them even more. I think the only thing he’s ever been is a Tamagotchi person.”

“Right.”

Cas goes in to save Dean by sitting beside him to distract Bones’s attention his way.

Sam sits in the armchair crammed under the window, clutching the beer Dean had given him closely, but not drinking it.

“So why did you come over?”

“Do I need a reason?”

“We came to see how you and Bones were settling in,” Cas says, nudging Bones away from licking his face long enough to talk.

“You didn’t buy a share in the dog,” Sam says to Dean.

Dean rolls his eyes. “Can we not do this in front of Cas? Let’s just… play cards or something. Text Eileen to join us as well when she gets off work.”

“Okay,” Sam says, clearly conceding there’s nothing too suspicious about this plan after a moment’s hesitation. He looks like he’s not done with the grand scheme argument in the least, but maybe they can drink and not talk about it for an evening. “So how come Cas drove you into town?”

Dean glances at Cas, pausing a moment from shuffling the pack of cards he’d immediately produced from an inside pocket of his jacket. “We were getting furniture. For our place.”

“Oh, yeah, that sofa looks pretty much past its expiration date.”

Cas glances at Dean. “We decided not to get a new sofa.” He’s never had the higher ground in social nuances before either: the Winchesters really are broadening his horizons.

Sam holds out his hand for the cards, takes them and shuffles them again. If anything he’s more competent at it than Dean is, and Cas was just remembering that he’d been wondering if Dean was a con man earlier in the day.

“Got new just about everything else, though,” Dean says. “And I’m going to do everything up. We bought all the paint and stuff today as well. Bit of a fixer upper. Like Cas.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m glad this house didn’t need any work. It even came furnished. I don’t have the energy to decorate.”

“Uh, we could help you unpack as well, if you like,” Dean says, looking around at the stacks of boxes still taking up the corners.

“It’s okay, you don’t need to,” Sam says, and starts dealing out the cards. Bones immediately comes over to investigate, knocking cards off the table, until Sam pulls him away gently, trying to calm him down. “They said he’s possibly got some training but he seems to have forgotten most of anything he ever knew, and he’s pretty excitable about being in a new place.”

“Did they find out if he had an owner?”

Sam rubs behind the dog’s ears until it flops down quietly at his side. “No, he’s a mysterious stray. They don’t have a clue, and no one’s reported a missing dog like him for miles.” He dares to let up the ear scratches, and starts to sort out the cards again, and Bones immediately gets up to start nosing at the table again.

“Why don’t I take him for a walk?” Cas offers.

The brothers both look at him with something bordering on horror.

Bones turns at the sound of a familiar word and bounds over to Cas in delight.

The dog wins. Cas takes him down to the diner to meet Eileen and, since she hasn’t checked her phone yet, abduct her back to Sam’s without warning.

They watch Bones running around tugging on the lead as he tries to investigate every corner of the road like he didn’t spend yesterday wandering up and down it while he was on the run. It makes them walk slowly, and Cas doesn’t have the leftover brain for casual talk, so it feels somewhat inevitable he eventually catches Eileen’s eye and says, “He kissed me.”

“Okay, congratulations.” She looks like she’s laughing at him, pulling her lips between her teeth and smiling to herself. Cas scowls, until she clarifies, “I think it’s cute. I hope you’re not waiting until marriage.”

“Definitely not.”

“You know I will always be there to help if you need it.”

“With what? I’m fine.”

“I can show you the condom demonstration on a banana. If you skipped health class because you didn’t think you needed it.”

“I –” He doesn’t remember that class. He remembers he did often go to the library to read when he thought classes were boring or pointless across a wide academic range. Missing out on sex education really hadn’t seemed like a loss. “Now?”

She shrugs. “Kitchen at work, maybe. There are bananas there.”

“This seems inappropriate for the workplace.”

“You don’t do anything with the banana.”

Thankfully, they reach Sam’s door, and Cas gets to forget wondering if he’d made Eileen think that he was planning on sleeping with Dean that night or if she had just thought he was being awkward as usual, or if he should put Dean off long enough to take her up on the offer.

It takes a little work to entice Bones back to come inside. Until he’s by the front door he digs in to exploring the grass at the side of the road, then when he catches sight of the open door at last, he suddenly stops acting like Cas is unfairly hauling him away from playing outside, and bounds into the house. When Cas follows inside, Sam’s messing with the dog, showering him in praise, and Eileen stands off to the side, waiting her turn and smiling at Sam. She rolls her eyes at Cas.

“Told you he likes it better than me,” she signs to Cas, who just nods.

“Hey, get us all another beer,” Dean suggests. He looks cheerful, so maybe leaving him alone with Sam hadn’t been a terrible idea. It seems pretty hit or miss, and Cas figures that Sam has to be setting aside his resentment to get along with Dean in the moment – Cas hopes that if they keep doing things together that they actually enjoy, perhaps they’ll at least rebuild the part of their relationship that lets them be friends. Cards are stacked on the table like they were halfway through a game, but by the time Cas returns from the kitchen they’re all over the floor, Bones is smugly flopped over on his bed, legs sticking everywhere, panting happily, and Dean’s scowling and picking cards up, while Sam finally gets around to kissing Eileen hello.

“So, poker night?” Dean asks, shuffling again.

“I don’t know how to play poker.”

“I thought you played cards with Eileen at work.”

“Neither of us know how to play poker.”

“Are you talking about me?” Eileen is settling onto the floor beside Sam, since there’s no extra chair, and the table is too low to sit beside on one of the dining chairs.

“Cas was just telling me you can’t play poker.”

“I can play poker! Cas won’t let me teach him because he says I will play for dishwashing chores.”

Dean taps Cas on the nose with the deck of cards. “That’s it, you can’t speak for Eileen to cover your ass without repercussions. We’re playing for the sake of her honour now, whether you like it or not.” Dean moves onto the floor as well, and Cas finds himself dragged down to join him.

“Are we playing for anything else aside from ‘honour’?” Cas asks, rolling his eyes.

“I’m not playing strip poker with my brother,” Dean says at once, over the top of a similar protest from Sam.

“I didn’t – what? Why would we do that in the first place?”

“How about we play for cash?” Sam says. “Small change, of course.”

“Are you scared I’ll take all your money?” Dean asks smugly.

“Some of us aren’t rolling in cash. But you know I’m the better player.”

“You so are not. I supported this family on poker games.”

“Yeah, and you wouldn’t let me play because you said I was too young.”

“Fourteen _is_ too young to go to shady poker games in the back of a bar.”

“You weren’t legal drinking age either.”

“Fine.” Dean opens his wallet and riffles through all the notes in it with his thumb. “I still have a couple of hundred bucks. I’m game if you are.”

Cas takes Dean’s wallet out of his hand and moves it out of reach. “Dean, I have about twelve dollars on my person right now.”

Dean makes a grab for his wallet anyway, which is exactly what Cas wanted – he catches the back of Dean’s shirts and holds him where he can whisper in his ear – “He’s goading you into winning so he can pay you back.”

Dean freezes, then snatches back his wallet, and digs out a handful of change and some small notes. “Fine, twelve dollars.” He glares at Cas. “Cheapskate,” he accuses him, with a wink from the side Sam can’t see.

Eileen looks fairly relieved as well, although Cas isn’t sure if that’s just because like himself, she’s living off an above average but still basic food service wage, or if she’s as tuned into the Winchester drama from Sam’s side. “Sam, go make us some food while Dean explains the rules,” she says, poking him in the arm.

Sam scowls at Dean, but gets up to go into the kitchen. Eileen follows him, probably to ask him what that was all about, and Bones, who was only pretending to sleep, gets up and follows them into the kitchen.

Dean leans into Cas at once. “Okay, first of all, that was so hot. Second of all, nice save.”

Cas considers telling him that Sam was broadcasting it so loudly it’s obvious that their drama is turning Dean into an idiot, or to ask if the family history they spilled is true or an exaggeration, but instead he leans the rest of the way and kisses Dean, tasting beer on his mouth and chasing that past his lips to his tongue. Dean grabs Cas’s tie when he tries to pull away and hauls him back for a second kiss. Cas feels helpless with Dean pulling on his tie like that, so he stops resisting and slides his hand under Dean’s shirt, just to feel how hot his skin is under his palm – Dean’s lower stomach muscles seem to tremble under his touch. Dean pushes him away, gasping.

“Shit, I have to teach you how to play poker. In a couple of minutes.” He glances through the wide open kitchen door, but Sam and Eileen are talking, face to face and Sam helpless to look away as much as Eileen.

Dean runs a hand over his face, and then reaches over to try and un-muss Cas’s hair, and gives up it up as a loss pretty quickly. He takes a long pull from his beer. “Uh. So you have… cards…”

Cas has no idea how to play poker by the time Sam and Eileen get back with more beer, popcorn, and a promise of potato wedges in the oven.

As soon as Eileen deals for them, Cas shows Dean his hand. “Are these any good?” he hisses.

“Oh, dude, come on,” Sam says.

Dean leans in and moves some of Cas’s cards around for him. “Here you go, honey. Just do what I do this round,” he murmurs into Cas’s ear. If Cas thought it was hot to realise how easily they could have been noticed kissing, Dean seems to love muttering pet names to Cas under the guise of tactical advice.

Sam does indeed beat Dean, but he has him out of the game within a few rounds, while Cas, somehow, is doing better than anyone else. Dean has his arm across the sofa cushions behind Cas, his fingers playing with Cas’s hair as he leans back against the sofa, and Dean can lean in to whisper encouragement and explain what Cas should do next, at total leisure to call Cas ‘sweetheart’ and ‘babe’ as much as he likes. Cas has absolutely no idea what he’s doing, and Sam is clearly trying to read him and failing, instead of paying attention to Dean’s eyes sweeping the table. Eileen is playing to win as well, and not tactically helping Sam out. Within about half an hour Cas has forty eight dollars in front of him, and an ear burning from the amount of times Dean’s nuzzled and nipped at him while Sam and Eileen were scowling at their cards and sizing each other up.

“You’re a natural,” Dean says to Cas, slapping him on the shoulder, and he goes to get more beer.

He doesn’t deal himself any cards when he sits back down.

Cas gives Sam and Eileen back their money to buy into the game again, and after a much longer game where Sam doesn’t go easy on anyone in the first part, eventually Dean – that is, Cas – loses out and they become spectators to Sam and Eileen sitting with their ankles tangled together, glaring at each other over their cards, and paying no attention to anything outside their increasingly charged game.

“I vote we tell them it’s time to switch to strip poker and we make a tactical retreat,” Dean mutters to Cas, fingers sneaking down his side to squeeze his thigh again.

Cas squirms. “We should wait for them to finish this game.”

“I don’t know, bro code says we’re probably cockblocking him.”

“We’re allowed to just walk out in the middle of a social interaction because they might have sex?”

“Well do you want to be here when they start?”

Cas gets up, and helps Dean to his feet. He expects Dean to drop his hand like it’s hot, but he twines his fingers with Cas’s and squeezes his hand.

Sam finally looks up. “Oh, you’re going?”

“Some of us have to work tomorrow.”

“And by that you mean Cas, not you?”

“Hey, I have a house to paint.”

“What – oh, I get it, you’re doing that thing where instead of paying rent, you decorate for him?”

“Yes, that is exactly what I’m doing,” Dean says, pulling Cas by the hand towards the door. “I think I’ll start with our bedroom.”


	26. Chapter 26

Dean’s in a weird mood on the walk back. He laughs most of the way down the hill, but in a bitter sort of way, starting with a dismissive snort before it turns into hysterics. Cas doesn’t feel the need to join in, waiting for Dean to calm down.

“You think he fucking gets it yet?”

“Dean, speaking as someone who almost never understands the sort of social cues that indicate people are sleeping together, I think you’re being a little unfair. It took Eileen six attempts to explain to me that she and Sam had slept together, and I was expecting that they _would_. You didn’t try to tell him in plain words, and if he doesn’t think you’re interested in men, he might only be perturbed but still completely uncertain by the signals you thought you were giving off.”

“I’m not having a belated twenty fucking years coming out party just because he missed the memo.”

“Well, Eileen may explain things to him, and save you the trouble. She knew I was interested in you before you even came to town, and she has more than enough intuition for the both of us.”

“I hope so. Wait, does everyone in town know we’re together? I mean, since before we did?”

“I assume so.”

“Well that explains why the witch who lives above the general store rushed out into the street and gave me a candle the other day.”

“What.”

“You know, lady who always has the massive purple pendant on a string around her neck? Sits on the beach doing yoga at five a.m.?”

“When are you on the beach at five a.m.?”

Dean shrugs. “Sometimes I can’t sleep.”

“I suppose that’s Tasha. Maybe she gave you the candle to help you sleep.”

“No, she said, ‘Thank you for what you’ve done for Castiel,’ and walked off before I could say anything else.”

“Well that’s weird.”

“Yeah, well, the sheriff let me off a speeding ticket and everyone keeps smiling at me and saying hello all the time, and now every time I go into the bar, whoever’s serving asks me if I’m meeting you there… Apparently you’re popular.” Dean gestures vaguely at the road leading to the bar.

“That can’t possibly be right.”

Jamie coincidentally comes from the direction of the bar, bundled up in her coat, and makes a beeline for them. “Hey guys! You going my way?”

“Yes,” Cas says, bemused.

Jamie grins at them, falling into step. “So, were you on a date?”

“Just playing cards with my brother,” Dean says.

“Oh, yes. He’s dating Eileen now. Aren’t they lovely together?”

“Uh –”

“Oh! Did Sam get to keep the dog?”

“Yes, he’s called it Bones,” Cas says.

“That’s hilarious. Is it a Star Trek reference or just because dogs and bones?”

“Oh my god, that didn’t even occur to me,” Dean says. “Wait, you watch Star Trek?”

“Raised in a Trekkie family…” Jamie does some hand gesture at Dean which goes completely over Cas’s head.

Dean beams at her. “I probably shouldn’t tell my friend Charlie about you.”

“Oh, no, with your seal of approval, I’d love to meet him.”

“Her.”

“Ah.” Jamie tips her head thoughtfully, but is distracted in a moment. “Oh, this is my place. Well, I’ll catch you later!” She hurries up the drive of the house, glancing over her shoulder. Cas turns to watch her fumbling her keys, dropping them, and after scrambling around picking them up, cramming them in the lock. The door slam echoes down the street.

“Was she acting weird to you?” Cas asks carefully. He doesn’t normally judge, but that was at least unlike Jamie.

“I barely know her, but yes, I think latching onto near-strangers, talking at them a hundred miles an hour and then running home so fast you bounce off the door is a little weird.” Dean looks around the empty street and sighs. “This town freaks me out sometimes. You can’t feel it?”

“It feels normal to me. I think you have an overactive imagination.”

They stand quietly for a moment, nothing there but the sound of the waves behind them. The town is still except for a cat that comes out from around the store, and slinks away under a parked car.

“Yeah, okay, let’s go home.” Dean pulls on Cas’s hand again. Cas follows a few steps before he glances over his shoulder again, and thinks he spots some movement far down the street, near the corner leading to the bar. Maybe it was the cat again.

He forgets about it as they head up the street to the house and he sees his truck parked awkwardly in the drive, reminding him of all their hard work today to get started transforming the house into a home. The thought of Dean painting the house and building furniture fills him with warmth, and a sudden excitement for the future – to see what the house would look like when everything was done. And the feeling that Dean’s the one investing the money, the time, the enthusiasm into this… _for_ Cas. It’s the strangest feeling to be certain about someone genuinely wanting Cas, to _do_ things for him and want to be around him for his own sake. It retroactively makes his entire previous life feel somewhat cold and empty to realise how long he lived not knowing what it was like to have Dean there.

When they get in, Cas looks around the crowded hall, full of stacked boxes and cans of paint, and thinks he might cry.

“You okay?” Dean asks, realising Cas has frozen in the hall.

“Yes. I’m fine. I’m going to go have a shower, then go to bed. I don’t mind if you stay up later than that. I know I kept you out of the house all day and you haven’t been able to work.”

“It’s okay, it’s my day off too. Because I say so.”

“Regardless, I’m going to go shower now.”

Dean comes back to step into Cas’s space, but he only adjusts Cas’s tie back to neat and tidy order, before letting the silk run through his fingers. “When you come to bed, you can leave this on if you like.” He gives Cas’s tie a little pull, and Cas stumbles forwards a step even though Dean had barely exerted any real pressure on the tie. Dean laughs and goes into the front room. Cas stands in the hall trying to remember what he was about to do and who he even is.


	27. Chapter 27

Cas showers quickly, scared to even touch any part of himself, and stands with the water beating down on him for a minute after he’s washed his hair, trying to remember if he washed his hair or not. He leaves his clothes in a pile on the floor and after towelling off, heads out of the bathroom without bothering to grab his robe from the back of the door.

He can feel his dick bouncing uncomfortably strangely as he walks, not used to wandering around flooded with arousal. He normally has to entice life into it in the shower for the sake of ritually masturbating because it’s healthy and cuts down on inappropriate erections at other times. It’s such an incredibly boring part of his life he mentally likens it to remembering to wash his hair, and vaguely enjoying the soothing feeling of massaging shampoo into his scalp. Dean is making him retroactively regret his complete lack of interest in his own body as well. His entire history is turning into grey tasteless sludge in Dean’s wake.

He feels his heart beating hard in the back of his throat, wondering what will happen that night.

Somehow Dean beats him to bed, looking freshly showered himself, and naked and smug, his hand tracing up and down the line between his navel and crotch, working himself up slowly without touching. “Upstairs bathroom,” Dean says, as Cas stands at the foot of the bed, working out how to ask him how he got there before Cas, and at a loss for words at the sight that greeted him. “Long term goals, I’m taking a sledgehammer to the purple tub.” 

Perhaps Cas zoned out in the shower longer than he thought he had.

“I thought the water pressure was acting strangely.” His voice sounds lower and rougher to his ears.

Dean pats the space beside him, and Cas climbs onto the bed to kneel at the end. “Are you good?” Dean asks at once.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m fine.”

“Come here, then.”

Cas shuffles so his knees are level with Dean’s calves instead of his ankles.

“Cas… I hate to ask after everything you put me through today, but are you scared of this?” Dean moves his hand away to his side, trying to neutralise his presence, but Cas’s eyes are fixed on Dean’s dick. He knows he’s made it harder than that today already just by breathing on Dean the wrong way, but without a safe layer of jeans in the way it feels uncomfortable and too real. He feels his own dick hardening just from the sight, but a deep down horror of touching. It’s conflicting and unsettling, and now he’s at the finish line of this long journey of insisting he was ready to have sex with Dean, he wants to take another lap.

“Yes,” Cas finally says.

“Is it because you’re not sure you want to do this, or because you’ve never done it before?”

“Both.”

Dean sighs out a long breath. “That’s okay, Cas. I figured this might happen. We’ll just do what you’re comfortable with. You want to just sit there and get off by yourself while I do me?”

Cas shakes his head. “No. Uh – more than that. I want...” He gestures between the two of them, vaguely.

Dean licks his lips slowly, his brow tight with the concentration of reading Cas. “You want to get me off?” He gestures his crotch with an unsubtle jerking gesture.

Cas shakes his head. “Um, not that I never want to do it. I just can’t right now.”

“That’s okay. I have to remember how you looked horrified the first time you really got a good look at me naked. Have to keep reminding myself that’s what I’m dealing with when you almost reduce me to begging over a kitchen counter in a fucking IKEA. You have no idea how –” He clears his throat, shifting uncomfortably. “I, um. So you want me to get _you_ off?”

Cas swallows, his throat dry.

“I can do that,” Dean says, grinning. “Or are you a bit nervous of the whole rock your world deal? I could go gentle, knock, like, a subcontinent or something. I’m used to the weepy forehead-touching missionary position nonsense when I need to go gently with someone, but…”

Cas shivers, as Dean gestures at him with a joking critical look.

“Okay so I’m writing that in the suggestions box once you’re up for the dick on dick stuff, and in the meantime, how do you want to do this? We could lie down with you as the little spoon and I do the reach around while we snuggle? Is that...”

“I want your mouth on me.” Cas can hardly believe he said it, the words jumping from the same place that demanded Dean come live with him in the first place.

“…Cas, that’s the world shaking package deal, I don’t have a-a-a mile under the speed limit in a residential area version of a blow job in me. Ask literally anyone. Actually, don’t, there’s no one in town I’ve sucked off and I don’t think if you borrowed my phone and started calling around, anyone would appreciate getting that call at one in the morning...”

“You’re rambling. Will you do this for me?”

“Yes. God yes. Especially, um, if you keep commanding me to do stuff in that voice.”

“What voice?”

“The… you know, sexy c-commanding voice.”

“I’m not doing a voice.”

“You do it all the time. You give me a semi just telling me I’m drinking your shitty coffee or getting nothing.”

“Then… please will you ‘suck me off’ right now without any more talk?”

“You – you can’t say please all nervously like that. Shit, I shouldn’t have told you… I’ve probably ruined it forever.”

“ _Dean_.”

He shivers, reaching between his legs to squeeze himself before he slides down the bed to sit in front of Cas. “You can tap out if you get freaked. Just say the word. Shit, I’m taking a forty year old dude’s virginity now, aren’t I?”

“Does this count?”

“Yes, you will probably want to go around smugly acting like you’ve had the best sex of your life after this, fair warning about the side effects.”

“It’s the _only_ sex I’ll have had.”

“Exactly. Um.”

Cas takes Dean’s hand and squeezes it. “I’m not scared of this. Please act like there’s nothing strange about it.”

“There is, though. It’s you.” Dean gives him a half-smile which seems sad to Cas. Or… Maybe just as overwhelmed as he feels.

Dean takes Cas’s knees and gently arranges him to sit with them apart, and kisses the inside of Cas’s knee, and meets Cas’s eye. Cas nods, and Dean kisses a line along his thigh, until Cas feels his cheek brush against the side of his dick, stubble grazing it. Cas tips his head back, breathing in shakily. Dean leans back a little. “Other knee or...”

“Move on.”

Dean hooks Cas’s legs over his shoulders, and shifts up to kiss from Cas’s navel down, Cas’s dick bumping the hollow of his throat. Dean pulls back slowly, his chin grazing Cas’s dick, and a pulse of fluid leaves a shining line from his chin to his lips, before Dean moves back just enough to look up at Cas and grin, raising his eyebrows like, you know what comes next.

“Please,” Cas says, before immediately remembering Dean said he didn’t like Cas saying it. He doesn’t seem to mind now – he sighs, a gust of hot air over the head of Cas’s dick that makes him tremble with the effort of staying still for Dean. And then Dean suddenly grins cheekily and leans forward and swallows him down, and Cas’s hips arch off the bed and he shouts his pleasure, grabbing at Dean’s shoulder with one hand, the other clutching a fistful of the bedcovers.

Dean pulls off and waits for Cas to sink back to rest with a shivery movement and a groan, and then he bobs down over him again, sucking and licking and pausing to watch Cas’s reaction with a smug grin every so often. Saliva makes his whole lower face shine, and Dean seems to deliberately want to make Cas’s dick as wet as possible, rolling his tongue around it and pulling back to watch a thread of saliva and Cas’s fluid mixing and breaking, leaving his chin wet and Cas’s dick wetter. And when he gets bored of the game of licking up and down and teasing it with kisses, he swallows Cas down again, until Cas feels himself hitting the back of Dean’s throat, and the way it closes and works as Dean swallows and slides his mouth up and down. Cas thinks he’s about to come – the tight feeling in his stomach that he always gives into without much fuss – but he realises Dean is messing with him and knows it better than Cas, as he pulls off to grin at Cas again, resting his chin in his hand. “How’s it going.”

“Dean, _please_ ,” he gasps.

Dean rolls his own hips against the bedspread, and presses a light little kiss to Cas’s dick, then another, and takes an agonising slow time to make his way down, and then suddenly has his mouth on Cas’s balls, and Cas shudders and shifts his grip from Dean’s shoulder to pulling his hair, until Dean has to let go to whimper and groan. Cas yanks him by his hair back up so his mouth is at the head of his dick again, where it’s been dribbling onto his stomach. “Stop fucking around,” Cas says, and Dean shudders, driving his hips into the bed. “And stop doing that. I don’t want you to make a mess on the sheets.”

“ _You’re_ making a mess on the sheets.” Dean sounds drunker than the few beers Cas had seen him cheerfully knock back with almost no outward effect. “Please say ‘fuck’ again.”

“I’ll say it if you promise not to come on the sheets.”

“You’re so fucking weird,” Dean says. “I’m going to go get a towel even though we’re gonna need to do laundry tomorrow no matter what.”

“You’re joking.”

Dean slips free of Cas despite an attempt to grab him. “We’re working with your neuroses, not against them. Stay there. No touching.” Cas can see that Dean’s dick is flushed dark with blood. And that he’s already left a dark spot on the covers where he was dry humping them.

He leans back and looks at his own dick, pressing into his stomach, aching without Dean’s mouth on it. He reaches down and squeezes it, tipping his head back and sighing at the relief as he pulls on it again, amazed that something he’s done for himself every other night for his entire life since puberty feels so different, hot and real and sending waves of pleasure he’s deeply attuned to all the way to his toes.

“Fucking hell, I was gone like twenty seconds. Get up, sit on this towel.” Dean throws one of Cas’s less favoured bath towels at him, and Cas is forced to concentrate on spreading it over the bed, choosing to line it from the headboard down; he shifts around to lean back against his pillows, and Dean slides between his legs again. “This is better, isn’t it?”

Cas sighs contentedly, his head falling back at the feeling of Dean’s breath on him.

“Of course, you started yanking it as soon as I left you alone for a second, after I told you to wait, so I don’t know why I should do anything for you.”

“I didn’t want to stop feeling like this. What if my erection faded and I didn’t want to have sex again for weeks?”

“Well I would try really hard not to take it personally. And then when you were ready again...”

“You’d fuck me.”

“Mm.” Dean leans down and kisses Cas’s stomach, open-mouthed and nipping at the flesh, to watch the muscles jump.

“I want to fuck you too,” Cas says, enjoying the word in his mouth – crude and dirty, like Dean’s attempt to lick Cas clean while his hand teases more fluid to slide from Cas’s dick. Dean shudders and swallows Cas down again. “I’m fucking your mouth now, aren’t I?”

Dean shakes his head a little, and then his hands are under Cas’s rear, encouraging him to lift his hips and thrust gently into his mouth. After a moment Dean offers a shaky thumbs up. Cas takes his hand and laces their fingers together.

“I think I love fucking you,” Cas gasps. He catches himself at the last moment from repeating the sentiment without the vulgarity, feeling Dean’s surprised flinch before Cas finished the sentence. Not time yet, Cas thinks, so he tips his head back, and thinks, _I think I love you_. “Fuck,” he groans out loud, “ _Fuck_.” Just saying it heightens the feelings, makes it all feel so much more base and real and… “Fuck!” he grabs Dean’s shoulder again, and feels himself spilling down Dean’s throat. Dean swallows and swallows with perfect timing, and then pulls off, grinning happily, as he sits back on his heels between Cas’s legs and takes himself in hand to make quick work of his own needs.

He wipes his hand on Cas’s knee, and then dabs it clean with the towel and exaggerated care, before he moves to flop down beside Cas. “Happy welcome to sin day,” he mutters, feeling around for the edge of the blanket. “You okay?”

“Every part of that was unexpected and alarming.”

“Surprised and alarmed. Not a bad review, considering.”

Cas pushes Dean away so they can get under the covers. “Thank you, Dean.”

“Dude, that was fifty percent entirely selfish and it always should be. Never have sex when you think you _or_ the other person or people are the only ones getting something out of it.”

“Oh. Then what do I say?”

“Maybe ‘fuck’ again? I enjoyed that part the most.”

“I’m not going to say ‘fuck’ again just to amuse you.”

Dean chuckles, and buries his face in Cas’s neck.

“Dean, the next thing I want to do is learn how to make you feel like that.”

“Next thing as in when you next want to do sexy things, or next as in as soon as we’re rested up a bit here, because I gotta say, I’ve never seen you awake this late at night by choice, and your alarm is going off in, like, four hours.”

“ _Fuck_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, right, here ends another little flurry of updates, while I work ahead. At the time of posting, I am 2 scenes deep into the next chunk and *very* excited to write what happens after them. Rest assured, once I've finished that chunk I'll post it like I've been doing with each chunk of the story so far in short succession. There's a fair amount of nonsense still to go, but we'll leave Dean and Cas to rest here now ;)
> 
> You can check for updates on accountability on my blog [here](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/tagged/terrible-coffee-au) \- I usually post word count or other things to show how much work I've done.


	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to update a couple of chapters because this next section is taking an enormous amount of time to write, and a few family problems are devouring my time... I have a LARGE amount of this story written that I've been sitting on but not wanting to share because I prefer posting a contained arc all in one go, which you'll notice if you've been following along from the start.
> 
> Anyway despite having a huge buffer it still doesn't end in a place I would be comfortable it ending, and this sort of family crappiness is exactly *why* I haven't been posting as I write because then we'd be waiting for weeks in the WORST place to wait for a new chapter (not on a cliffhanger or anything just on an unsatisfactory place between interlinking scenes :P) ... But I figure I can post this lil run up to the long section while I wait, even if it's pretty unexciting on its own. >.>

Cas wakes up alone, and figures the sound of stuff being dragged around in the hall was what woke him, because it’s just before his alarm.

He doesn’t expect, when he stumbles out of his room feeling sore and sticky, to see the hall clear of boxes, a ladder by the door, and Dean halfway up it, still naked, prying open the can of sea-green paint they’d agreed on.

“Do you not sleep?”

“Not really, no.”

“I thought you were starting with the bedroom.”

Dean gives him a baffled look. “No, I said that to piss Sam off. And I don’t need to strip any wallpaper here, so it’s easier for starters.”

Cas keeps staring at him, until he hears his alarm going off back in the bedroom, breaking the confused stalemate.

“Don’t you have to go to work?”

Cas groans, and drags himself into the bathroom to have his second shower in just a few hours, ignoring the alarm and leaving it to ring out.

Dean’s started painting by the time Cas gets out, an experimental square which he’s standing on the floor again to squint at as he watches it dry.

“Do you like the colour?” he asks.

Cas stands next to him, and pretends to have a moment to think. “It looks nice,” he says, not entirely sure he knows exactly what else it should look like if it was horrifically wrong. It’s a pleasant colour and Dean’s painted it neatly, and there’s nothing else in the hall that has any colour scheme beyond peeling white paint and bare wood, so Cas doesn’t exactly know what he’s supposed to say critically.

“Okay, great,” Dean says. “I’d better do the rest then. Have a good day at work, sweetcheeks.”

Cas scowls at him.

“I’ll put that nickname in the ‘maybe’ box,” Dean says, and goes to the ladder again.

Cas waves to him and leaves.

He gets most of the way down the hill and to the diner before he realises that he had a whole exchange with a beautiful, naked, domestic Dean and felt nothing more than he would have once expected to – that is, floored by the idea of such a wonderful, confusing man deciding to paint Cas’s hall for him, but it hadn’t been strange and charged.

The wave of utter relief that it’s over doesn’t really surprise him. The closeness he’d shared with Dean has been a transformation – transcendent, maybe. It makes him think long words, now he’s moved beyond the four letter ones.

And yet he really doesn’t want to go through that emotional ordeal again any time soon. He knows that time will get whittled down and down the more he interacts with Dean now. He wants to savour the feeling now as an act of resistance, but also fear.

Now he knows how it could even begin to feel, the very concept of Dean in his life is utterly terrifying to him.

And when he is scared, he knows he fights back too hard. Like selling up and coming here, for starters. Better to sink into relief that he hasn’t been fundamentally changed, that he doesn’t lust after Dean by default… than start blaming Dean. Who knows what for – something, inevitably.

He starts work determined to act completely normally. Eileen greets him uncharacteristically  giggly and flushed.

“I have _so_ much carpet burn.”

“Did you talk to Sam last night?”

She looks at him with raised eyebrows. When he doesn’t react, she says, “Talk? He grabbed me as soon as you were out the door!”

Cas sighs, finishing typing his apron.

“What? You have the poop look, Cas.”

How does he even start to tell her that Sam hasn’t got a clue about Dean and himself, when it’s so obvious to Eileen, she can’t even see that Sam hasn’t realised, because surely it should be obvious to him too. He’s never seen her as happy as since Sam, and giving her reasons to slap him upside the head for being dense doesn’t appeal to him any more.

“You used to be so grumpy and prickly,” he decides to say.

“Like you, you mean. So?”

“Don’t you worry about changing?”

“I _like_ being happy.” She signs “happy” for emphasis too, like she just can’t stop herself from adding it. “Don’t you?”

Cas shakes his head.  

She laughs. “I love you, Cas.” She kisses her fingertips and smushes them into his cheek so hard she turns his head.

He gives up trying to talk to her while she’s in this mood, and goes to set out the tables with mustard and ketchup bottles. When he comes back for the menus, Eileen corners him again.

“Before I came here, I was miserable.”

“What –”

She switches to sign – “Just give me your attention. I never let anyone close, for various reasons, and I was always scared that I was doing things wrong, that I wasn’t good enough, that my parents would be disappointed if they knew how I had grown up lonely and miserable.

“When I got to this town to house sit for a summer for my aunt, I hid inside for a week. And then I had to come out to get supplies. And I walked into Benny and spilled groceries all over the street because I was keeping my head down. He bought me new eggs and walked me home, and told me that he was opening a diner, but his friend who he said was the best cook he knew, and made the best pies ever, had flaked out on him and he didn’t know what to do.

“So I made a decision not to hide any more, because he was kind to me, so I took the job. And then you came to town and I decided not to be lonely any more, and pretended I liked talking, because you were interested in who I _was,_ and I had a friend. And now Sam’s here, and I’ve decided not to be sad any more.”

“I didn’t know –”

“Of course you didn’t, I never told you.” She picks up a spatula and jabs him with it. “Go lay the tables now, we’re running late.” It was the final sort of way to end a conversation with no option to respond, though Cas continues thinking about it for hours.

Customers soon show up and test their very slow start, and it’s not until Sam comes in at three in the afternoon that Cas even notices with his front brain that he wasn’t there. He sees Bones waiting patiently outside.

“Are you here to write?” Cas asks.

“I hope so. I wore him out finally running up and down the beach… Now _I’m_ tired.”

Cas nods sympathetically, his own late night headache twinging. Maybe he should just do what Eileen does about these sort of things and cheerfully, with no reservations, tell Sam that his brother had kept Cas up late last night.

He pours Sam coffee and leaves him to it.

At around four Cas looks up to see Dean standing looking freshly showered and grinning by the pastry display, and Cas drops the full coffee pot on the floor, where it shatters.

Clean up provides a good five minutes distraction while Cas tries to get his heart to calm down. Dean is a _vivid_ sense memory on sight, when he smiles saucily like that, and the way he hurries behind the counter to help clean up does nothing to settle Cas, who feels more like he’s in shock than actually aroused by Dean. The idea of them continuing their daily lives like nothing ever happened suddenly seems ridiculous, their worlds too small to contain what happened, and how can they just smile and play this game?

Hidden from view behind the counter, Dean takes Cas’s tie and doesn’t let him get up until he’s pressed a quick kiss to his lips.

The broken pieces gathered together and the spilled coffee sopped up, Cas manages to act less frantic, and Dean seems to think it’s safe to ask, “You okay?”

Cas heads to the back to throw away the glass safely. “Yes, I’m just… tired.”

Dean smirks harder.

With the spare coffee pot brewing, Cas watches Dean mess with his camera, and wonders if Eileen is right. He’s not sure what Dean is changing him into – someone impulsive and clumsy and sometimes quite stupid. Dean had said he thought Cas had a stick up his butt on first impression. Cas thinks, perhaps, what he has been is careful, and Dean, reckless and generous and throwing himself into a hundred things at once whole heartedly, has rubbed off on him and removed the stick.

He very self-consciously undoes the buttons on his cuffs, and rolls his sleeves up to the elbow, on the pretence that there were big coffee stains on them anyway.

Cas hates the idea of changing – hates that he did this and regrets it as soon as he’s tried to make a tiny demonstration of change. But he loves Dean, so he forgives him.

He looks over at Dean again, and Dean guiltily lowers his camera, his ears red. “I’m, uh, modelling the inside of the diner. For practice.”

“Are you.” He can see all of Dean’s tells that he made that up on the spot, and despite there probably being other customers to actually help, drifts over towards him, helplessly drawn.

“Okay, fine. The forearms thing is like you’ve stripped off in the middle of the diner. It’s goddamn pornographic after how neatly you dress the rest of the time.”

Cas blushes and immediately reaches to roll them back down.

“No, um. Please don’t. Forget I said anything. Come on, just smile for the camera. You were looking so solemn.”

Cas rolls his eyes, and Dean takes more pictures anyway, before he pushes aside his empty plate. “I’m heading off. Only came down to town to get more old newspapers from the store and grab a late lunch.”

“How’s the hall looking?” He remembers Dean started painting it naked and at once he’s got heat crawling under his own skin again. If Dean came into the diner looking like he’d only just washed up, he probably stayed naked until as late as three. Dean’s answer blurs in his mind as background noise. Long after he leaves the diner, Cas has that thought in his head, lines blurring between casual nudity and, suddenly, the body as an inherently sexual thing, at least when it’s Dean’s, and in front of him.

He has no idea when Sam left with Bones, but it’s only when Cas is walking home at nearly ten at night that he remembers that he sent Dean after him, and that was why he had been in the diner messing with his camera, or talking about going straight home loudly in front of Sam.

When Cas gets in, the hall smells of fresh paint and a neat first coat is drying all along the hall and a short way up the stairs. Dean is in the living room furiously scraping at the decaying wallpaper, surrounded by great curls of it.

“Hello, Dean.”

“Oh, hey. I could do with a beer.”

He doesn’t give anything away, so Cas figures if he did encounter Sam, it’s something between them in how he feels about it.

Cas gets Dean his beer, asks if he can help, and is rebuffed, and in the end he showers and goes to bed to read, since the television has moved to the spare room, under an old sheet.

Dean keeps noisily scraping at the walls, waking Cas up at several points in the night. Cas doesn’t even pretend to be asleep, but pointedly checks his phone when Dean crawls into bed around two.

He’s scared they’ll end up in another grumpy Sam-related emotional funk, but after Dean has slid his arms around Cas’s waist and nuzzled up against him for a minute, stinking of sweat and mildewing plaster, he starts talking.

“I went up to the cliffs like you told me to, and I couldn’t resist going into the woods, just to look down this really spooky path. I had my camera ready because you never know when you’re going to stumble on a-a-a wendigo, or werewolf, or something local and weird, you know?

“Anyway, I found this decrepit old cabin out there, and I was just nosing around it, when I hear a crashing in the undergrowth, and right as I have my camera in one hand and a stick to fend off a monster in the other, that damn dog comes running out to say hello. And Sam comes hurrying after it, yelling its name, which it’s had for two days so like hell it’s paying attention.

“He didn’t look too pleased to see me at first, but I convinced him that I had been curious to know what was up here after we visited him last night, and you were too much of a chicken to go up there in the dark.

“And then he helped me to explore the old cabin and we messed around making jokes and dares like we did when we were teenagers. It was… Good. We just hung out and talked about taking you and Eileen up here to spend the night and how long you’d last. I told him about my haunted house project.”

“Why were you so angry with the wallpaper then?”

“Huh? Oh, I was just really in the zone scraping it. Sorry if it woke you up.”

“I’m getting used to losing sleep because of you.”

Dean chuckles dirtily, but he just leans over to give Cas a brief kiss, and they settle down to fall asleep.


	29. Chapter 29

A comfortable sort of routine falls over their lives. Sam gradually manages to balance caring for Bones with morning and afternoon writing sessions at the diner. Dean throws all of his energy into transforming the house bit by bit, and when he’s not doing that he comes down to the diner to escape the building site mess, and to work on his laptop at the counter. Eileen insists on showing Cas the banana thing, which leaves him feeling faintly sick and even more reluctant to move forwards with Dean, not just for fear of change, or because he doesn’t feel it, because the worst thing is he still does, a lot and at inopportune times... but he is reluctant because of a faint horror at what it all entails.

Later, some very cautious searches on his phone do nothing to reassure him about it.

He still feels a sort of deep down warmth about Dean, but it feels like it works better at arms length, to appreciate what he does for Cas without daring to wade into doing anything about it. Cas doesn’t say anything to Dean about his reluctance to try anything else sexual, but either it freaked Dean out too for his own reasons, or he’s being very careful about Cas. That’s not to say they don’t touch, just that Dean is being overly hesitant, waiting to see what Cas does for initiating quick kisses and touches, never more than a press of the lips or a squeeze of his hand. If Cas feels emotionally frustrated and not entirely sure he can kid himself about not being sexually frustrated, he can’t imagine how Dean is handling it, knowing from experience what attraction is like now.

Nothing blows up into a huge charged situation that makes it seem impossible not to act on, and Cas remains relieved it doesn’t, that he can properly appreciate Dean without constantly having that befuddling cloud on his thoughts, though the memories are a fast way to arouse himself, and his dreams have become an obstacle course, Cas’s only comfort that Dean wakes up so much earlier most days that he’s unlikely to embarrass himself.

Whether Dean is tired from little sleep and his endless projects and determination to paint, sand, replace, fix and re-carpet the house, or aware of avoiding this too, he is sparing with any other touches, even the ones Cas was getting quite used to; fingers skimming down his spine in passing, squeezing his thigh when they sit close, or leaning in to talk right into Cas’s ear. They don’t even get as cuddly as before, with the couch banished to the spare room while Dean works on the front room. And he seems to be deliberately avoiding going to bed at the same time as Cas, even when Cas stays up with him.

Dean’s left a hundred half-finished improvement projects going around the house, but his fictional construction seems to be as piece meal, based on how he uses the two things to procrastinate on each other.

One day Cas comes in to find Dean having a lengthy video call with a high-pitched, fast-talking woman. Dean pulls Cas into view despite his attempts to avoid the kitchen entirely on hearing this, and he finds himself being beamed at by a red-haired woman with a backdrop of a thousand collectible bobble heads of presumably famous fictional characters, as Cas recognises a couple from Game of Thrones. The woman on the other end of the call actually shrieks when she sees him, and leans closer to her camera with such enthusiasm that she sets off most of the shelves nodding.

“Hey! You must be Castiel!”

“You’re Charlie.”

“Dean has told me _so_ much about you. I can’t get him to shut up and tell me about his game!”

“I’ll leave you to work and stop causing a distraction, then. I need to shower.”

“Aw, no,” Charlie protests, and Dean tries to pull him back, but Cas just tells her it was lovely to put a face with a name, and slips away. He goes to bed still hearing them talking indistinctly for several more hours.

The next time Dean is talking to her, it’s Cas’s day off, and they haven’t got any other plans except laundry and grocery shopping – Cas gets in to find Dean talking, and Charlie ends up watching as they put things away, quizzing Cas on things. He thought they’d have nothing in common, but it turns out she reads many of the same authors as him, and after ten minutes Cas has become extremely fond of her yelling enthusiastically about things he has quietly thought to himself for years.

Dean grumbles about Cas stealing Charlie, and goes to get the stuff Cas left in the truck – a bigger laundry rack, for one thing, since his is no longer up for the task with two sets of clothes crammed onto it.

Cas waits for him to disappear outside, and then sits at the kitchen table. “Charlie, you’ve known Dean his entire life, right?”

“Uh, ‘entire’ is a bit of a strong word. He called for the first time in six years last month, out of the blue after he flaked out on me going to comic con after paying for everything, and left me wandering around as one half of a Batman and Wonder Woman cosplay pair we’d planned,” she snorts.

Cas has no idea what that means, but he says, “It’s okay, I’m not asking about where he goes in the times he disappears,” and Charlie visibly sags with relief.

“Then what’s up, doc?”

Cas blinks at her. “There’s some sort of problem between Sam and Dean that I think traces back to something someone called Marv did. They’re actually talking right now, but...”

“Oh, the passive aggressive BFFs thing they do, yeah, I’ve been caught in that. Right after that thing with Ruby, and...”

“Ruby?”

“Oh, crap. Don’t bring her up, like. Ever. Let sleeping hell-beasts lie.”

Cas glances at the door, thinking he hears Dean returning.

“What about Marv?” he hisses.

Charlie shakes her head. “They mentioned him a lot but I think he lives out near their Uncle Bobby, so I never met him or figured out what he did.”

Dean’s at the door.

“So, explain what this Batman and Wonder Woman ‘cosplay’  was?”

“Oh, it’s when you dress up as the characters… You know them?”

Cas shakes his head.

“Wow. Dean wasn’t kidding. Um.” Charlie scrabbles behind her to grab two of her bobbleheads.

“’Course, as a joke I went as Batman –” She holds up one figure.

Dean reaches them after dropping everything in the hall, gets there at a half-run, and cuts out the call by closing his laptop.

“Nope. Not letting _you two_ sit next to each other at Thanksgiving. Nope, nope nope. She’d bring photo albums, I can tell.”

Cas accepts the defeat and goes to set up the laundry rack, leaving Dean to resume his call, sounding miffed but in that way where it is very clear he loves Charlie deeply despite whatever transgression she’d nearly committed against him.

Cas is growing used to Dean seeming comfortable and happy with their arrangement. He starts to be more confident in thinking the fragile handling is Dean desperately trying to prove that nothing is weird between them since they had sex. That their lives can carry on quietly and peacefully, and they can exist together.

Somehow, still under Sam’s radar.

Eileen won’t tell him because she doesn’t know it’s a thing to tell, and seems to talk neutrally enough about doing things with Cas and Dean that Sam never shows up to group events suspicious. Dean’s decided not to tell him out of pure spite, and Cas has a feeling that Dean’s hands off attitude is becoming the reverse of how he acted at the bar in front of Benny, extremely hands on.

Cas has no idea what he would even say to Sam to start to explain at this point, especially with Dean acting so pissed off with Sam over it that it’s making a chilly rift colder and deeper and Sam has no idea why but it’s not making him look anywhere past Dean to Cas waiting patiently beside him.

He feels responsible but even if she doesn’t know, he can conjure an inner Eileen to immediately spell out that this is Sam and Dean being idiots and it’s not his fault that this is over him. He has to keep getting her to tell him.

Then one night after work Cas comes out of the diner alone and later than usual after having to do more cleaning because of a busy day and messy customers. His truck is waiting outside the diner, engine starting up.

“Did you steal my truck?” Cas asks, leaning on the window to talk to Dean.

He grins. “You leave the keys right there on the counter. Anyone could walk off with it. C’mon, get in.”

Cas does so, and Dean drives off, and Cas feels like he might have been abducted.

On the road out of town, Dean barely goes far at all down it before he slows and turns off down a rough track.

“Where are we going?”

“Would have had to take the truck anyway. You couldn’t pay me to take my Baby up this road,” he says over the sound of the truck thunking through a series of potholes.

That’s not an answer, so Cas assumes there won’t be one, and watches the tree-lined route climb gently. After five minutes they emerge on a grassy hilltop. Cas takes one look at the view, mentally recalculates, and realises that they’ve stopped probably a stone’s throw from his house, but on the top of the hill behind it. Dean takes the truck dangerously close to the edge to turn it, then kills the engine once they’re pointing back down the path.

Quiet, aside from the waves and occasional late night gulls, fills the space around them.

Dean gets out and stretches. “I love the sea like this,” he says, gesturing the cliff.

It’s a still night, warm, and there are only scraps of cloud high up, giving the moon a blurry halo. Cas follows him to the cliff edge and looks down.

“Being this high makes me think about flying,” he says.

“What, in a plane?” Dean looks nervous of the idea immediately.

“No, just spreading my wings like a seagull and letting the wind carry me across the sea.” It’s a hopeful feeling, and ever since Cas got to the town, heights changed their meaning completely to him. Heights are natural and free.

Dean stares at him with a soft smile for way too long. Cas thinks maybe he should kiss him, but Dean suddenly turns and goes back to the truck. Cas immediately worries that he’s upset Dean somehow, but Dean just opens the tailgate of the truck and gestures Cas over.

Cas realises he’s filled the bed of the truck with blankets and pillows, turning it into an actual bed. The cooler is shoved in one corner.

“It’s such a good night. I thought you might want to watch the stars or something.”

Cas can’t say no to that, so he climbs up and offers Dean a hand.

The sky still has clouds scudding along, interrupting the view beyond them, but Cas cuddles up to Dean and enjoys watching him watching the sky.

He finishes his own beer too quickly and waits for Dean to finish his, taking his empty can. Instead of getting them fresh drinks he takes advantage of their empty hands to put his palm on Dean’s chest to push him down, and hold him in place so Cas can kiss him.

It’s natural, easy, something Cas falls into like they’ve been making out for weeks, all the barriers they normally keep up no longer in the way. Dean melts into all of Cas’s touches, moving towards Cas’s hands like they’re magnetic, but pulling away from his kisses teasingly, grinning at him like he wants Cas to kiss the smile off his face, and Cas is only too happy to chase after him and kiss him deeply for minutes at a time until Dean squirms and laughs and tries to get Cas to start the game again. It forces Cas to try and hold him still, until he’s lying on top of him, Dean hooking his legs over Cas, Cas tricking Dean into letting him hold his wrists with a distracting kiss, pinning them behind his head. Dean shivers and tips his head back, so Cas leans in to kiss his throat in turn, earning a moan that Cas loves the sound of, but which also brings him back to his senses a bit.

He finally pulls away from Dean, happily dazed, but relieved it’s the warm buzz he likes about kissing, and not attraction making itself uncomfortably known.

Dean makes a weird sort of pleading noise to try and get Cas back, but Cas cups Dean’s face gently with his hand. “Did you drive me up here to try and have sex in the back of my truck?”

He doesn’t want to sound mistrusting, but he knows there’s an accusation in his voice.

“What? No! I really did just want to stargaze with you.”

“Really?”

“I mean, maybe make out a little. But, c’mon, I didn’t even bring a towel to put down.”

That makes Cas laugh, and he leans in to kiss Dean again. Careful, but not too careful. Enough.

They kiss until the sky is starting to get bright again, and Cas is starting to forget who he is.

Three days later, Dean moves the TV back into the front room, which is now carpeted, painted, the ceiling repaired, and new furniture fills all the once echoing empty space.

Cas had last seen it bare and uncarpeted, so it’s a shock to come in from work and find Dean right back to catching up on a different soap opera, in his lazy TV clothes, stretched out on the sofa with a cushion in his arms, like this has been a totally normal boring day for him. If it weren’t for the transformation of the room, Cas would have thought he’d been there all day.

“Dean – it looks wonderful.”

“It looks like a real living room. You have seriously low standards.”

Cas huffs at him.

Dean sits up, and grins at him. “Come enjoy it for yourself. It’s no good just to look.” He pats the sofa cushions next to him, and Cas sits. His old sofa somehow feels even more comfortable surrounded by the feeling of a real home, and he chooses to forgive Dean for insulting the old room.

Dean stretches and squirms until Cas gives in and lets him lie in Cas’s arms, as he had done the night Cas had stopped Dean from kissing him up and down his neck, however nice it had felt.

Cas supposes there aren’t any reasons not to let Dean start it up again now, but he seems perfectly content to lie like this, absorbed in his soap opera.

Cas doesn’t know what he’s done to deserve not just a perfect domestic life with Dean, but that he’d fight so hard for Cas to share it with him. He’s stunned into gratitude, he realises – not just for the work Dean has done but for Dean behaving so perfectly for him, falling into whatever Cas needs. The moonlit truck make out has been on Cas’s mind, distracting him into smiling, going to work with his tie loose because it makes Dean stutter to look at him, and Cas spacing out thinking about that at the diner, remembering Dean’s hands on his face.

Dean hadn’t touched Cas lower than his chin or above the elbow the whole night, and Cas has had a dream of those kisses every night that leaves him hard when he wakes up, no matter how innocent it seemed. He knows that Dean letting him lead every step of the way is starting to get to him again, knowing the power to push on or initiate anything new is in his hands. And like holding off starting the relationship was something that Dean had enjoyed, something about that denial of pleasure getting to him more than he cared to admit, Cas has to wonder how he feels now and if it is driving him crazy. Cas’s thoughts are beginning to wander into thinking about how far Dean would let him go if that absolute trust was now all Cas’s choice about what their relationship looked like.

A fourth day of aching to touch Dean seems unbearable. Cas is starting to realise that unlike Dean he does _not_ enjoy the waiting at all, and he may as well show Dean his hand now, because what’s the point of being handed complete control to decide what they do if he doesn’t exercise it sometimes.

He lets his hand skim thoughtlessly along Dean’s side, like he was only moving it.

Dean makes a weird breathy noise and then clenches all over in surprise and embarrassment for being caught out enjoying it so much, going rigid in Cas’s arms.

Cas shifts his hand back up slower, fingers trailing behind, teasing, and Dean relaxes as he realises he wasn’t overreacting to something Cas hadn’t meant, and holds back another noise.

He’s lying pretty much on top of Cas on his back, one leg on the floor, one hooked on the arm of the sofa. Cas feels Dean doesn’t quite appreciate how much this puts him at Cas’s mercy, or perhaps he does, since he favours lying this way. Cas pulls away the cushion Dean’s using to keep his head propped up enough to see the screen, and Dean lets his head fall back against Cas’s shoulder without complaint.

Cas reaches up to trace Dean’s lips with his fingertips, enjoying the shape of his mouth, the dampness he’s left behind licking his lips. His other hand trails up and down Dean’s chest over his shirt, not exploring or teasing, just making it clear he wants to touch.

Dean’s still refusing to make any noise, stilling his reactions as much as possible, but Cas has a perfect view over Dean’s shoulder down the length of his body, and he can see the front of his sweat pants tenting.

He’s not sure if he’s pushing it or not, but when he moves his hand away from Dean’s mouth, Dean turns his head to follow, not done with his touch yet. Cas rethinks playing with Dean’s hair, and cups his hand around Dean’s chin, and Dean sighs again, seeming less embarrassed now. Cas tries stroking his face, and Dean shakes his head minutely and tries to nip at Cas’s thumb. Cas presses it hard over his lips to stop him. Dean makes a solid, surprised noise deep in his throat.

Cas keeps him shushed and resumes tracing circles on Dean’s tummy with his fingertips, and he immediately squirms, agitated. Cas pauses to check he doesn’t have a real disagreement, and Dean growls in frustration, thumping the side of the sofa with his fist for emphasis.

Cas closes his eyes, slides his hand into Dean’s sweat pants, and his thumb into Dean’s mouth. Dean is a shuddering mess in his arms almost immediately, moaning and sucking Cas’s fingers, thrusting into his hand. It’s not quite uncomfortable doing it like this – the position mimics if Cas laid down to do this to himself and he focuses all his imagination on pretending he’s passing on his own pleasure to Dean, but the reason he can’t feel what his hand is doing, or why he can’t predict Dean’s movements if this were himself, is because he’s willed every last part of his feeling on to Dean. That he’s numb to this entirely for himself. His hand in Dean’s mouth is another great distraction, focusing on the feeling of Dean’s tongue, the look on his face, and his muffled noises of pleasure.

Thankfully, it’s over quickly. Cas’s hand is suddenly rubbing sticky wetness up and down Dean’s dick, the front of his sweat pants soaking through with come. He quickly pulls his hand out and rubs it thoroughly on Dean’s leg. He pulls his other hand free to stroke Dean’s hair like he wanted all along.

Dean takes a minute to get his breath back before he asks, “Where did that come from?”

“I wanted to do it.”

Dean swallows hard and reaches up to wipe his face. “Yeah. Okay.” He nuzzles Cas for a moment, still recovering. “No, but seriously, is there anything I’ve got to do for you?” He shifts around to lie on his side, back against the sofa to get a better look at Cas. “You’re not even hard.”

“This was for you.”

He mumbles a very token protest, burying his face in Cas’s neck again.

They lie there for another minute before Cas asks, “Why _do_ you like my fingers in your mouth so much?”

“What? You’re the one who keeps putting them on my face.”

“I like how soft your lips are.”

Dean shivers and looks away to take Cas’s hand that he’s been holding awkwardly at his side. He kisses Cas’s palm. “It’s supposed to tease you, like I’m sucking you off,” he says, and manipulates two of Cas’s fingers slowly into his mouth, dragging over his lower lip, his tongue meeting Cas’s fingers and curling around them as he sucks gently.

“Oh, okay. I get it.”

He pulls Cas’s fingers out of his mouth, sucked clean. “Seriously. That’s it?” He moves Cas’s hand so he can lick along another of his fingers. “No dredging stuff up from a deep dark well of secret dirty thoughts?”

“I don’t have one of those. At least, not until – I have a shallow puddle of thoughts about you. But I do like that you find it exciting. I’ll happily do it as much as you like.”

“So you get nothing from the whole thing?”

“I liked making you make noise, and the way you reacted when I shushed you.”

Dean shivers. “Yeah, um.”

Cas nods. Dean makes him feel so strange. The fact he makes Dean feel out of his depth is strangely reassuring.

“So, uh,” Dean says after an appropriate pause to let that thought slide away, “Basically you’re trading home refurbishment for sex.”

“I do _not_ want you to think of it that way.”

Dean laughs and kisses Cas’s neck. “Only for fun. I know you like me for more than that.”

“I don’t understand why you would want to think it even for fun. I don’t think of you as an object. You’re my friend. Wonderful and complex man who has made my entire world brighter since you arrived here, and –”

Dean is the one to clamp his entire hand over Cas’s mouth. “Shh. Yeah, you’ll make me cry.”

Cas gently removes his hand. “Sorry.”

“Just don’t let it happen again,” Dean says jokingly scolding. He gets up with a disgruntled groan. “Yeah, need to shower now. You gonna join me?”

“No.”

“Fair enough.”

He comes to bed not long after Cas and cuddles close to him, pressing his back against Cas’s chest and pulling his arm over both of them. He mutters something about how he loves being the “little spoon,” but not to tell anyone. Cas isn’t entirely sure what that means, but the next morning he wakes up still curled up to a sleeping Dean still in the same position, so it has to be a good thing.

When he goes down to the diner, there’s a large sign on the door: REDUCED HOURS FRI - MON FOR STAFF VACATION.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *finger guns* apologies for the waiting for more of this story. I want to finish and post it as much as you want to read it. Thank you as always for reading <3


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